Harvesting of information - Ancestors in 52 Weeks

This year's challenge is 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks and is run by Amy Johnson Crow.

Topic Info:
You could interpret this literally and share about farmers in the family tree. You could also be figurative and share a "harvest" of information or a source that was bountiful in your research.

Honestly, this topic is a confusing one as I do have farmers in the family but they are either cow dairy farmers or sheep farmers. I only have it written down they are farmers. 

I guess you can say during the US fall and winter are the harvesting times for genealogy I found. Usually it's because the kids are back to school and everyone's routines are back into some kind of pattern along with the amount of holiday days people get off during these seasons. This usually when my "crops" I've been research starting to mature and start to be cropped. 

My great grandfather, Jules.
Credit: gailfboo

This happened last week with the Sherman family, who my Great Aunt Florence married into. I had one of her step children's ancestors contact me and ask me about information. Since then, I've been doing research into this side for him. This week and probably next, normal life will be upsetting the research, but this is a normal problem for genealogists.

Using the FAN Technique to help understand found information Instead, this week I'm going to write about how I started harvesting of information of my Belgium ancestors once I made the connection from my great grandfather Jules and his name in Belgium.  I have talked before about how I used the FAN technique to put everything together. 

In this post. I'm going to show how I used the Belgium Archives to find ancestors in the areas I knew about which led me to other areas. Then how I looked, and continue to look, up the original documents. 

Translation documents
There are 2 things which drive me nuts. One people use translation documents like they are the original documents and refer to them. Translation documents are from people who, usually on a volunteer basis, open a batch of documents and then you try and read the original documents and fill in the blanks in the software. This is done so the document can then be index into a database for searching. The problem with this, is if the person who's typing the information in either cannot read it and takes a guess or mistypes it, the searching doesn't work. The other thing is sometimes even though it looks like a clean scan, sometimes the writing is not right or the person who took the information down mistook the information the person gave. This happened on my paternal side with my great grandfather Adam.

You MUST get the original documents to ensure the information is correct. For instance, someone typed in information and when I pulled the original document, I found it was for someone else because the name and information was not what the translation was.

The other thing which drives me nuts, is when people use other people's trees as fact. I have seen so many trees which have the wrong information, and then people copy this information and it breeds like rabbits in heat. I've seen so many people have kids before they were born or continue to have kids after they had died.

You MUST check your facts and sometimes you must recheck your facts. Sometimes if I can't be 100% sure if its an ancestor, then I mark it as maybe but not definite. This way if you can prove the information, then you can accept the questioned information as fact but if not, you can just delete it as well.

Getting back to the my use of the Belgium Archives....
Once I was able to tie in my 2x great grandfather Joannes Julius Gauquie, the documents I found were a treasure trove. Next to the main birth document of Jules, it had a tiny note about his father and further information. When you flipped the page, it had his father's military records, details on his parents marriage and each parents and their parents information on where they lived.

Here's one of the documents I found using the searching technique below. This is for my 2x great grandfather. It shows his parents a where they lived and the date - all highlighted. This is in 1871. Credit: FamilySearch

Using this information, I was then able to go the the Belgium Archives and look up the areas for the same last name - Gauquie.

Next, I went looking for Desiderius to see what was available in the Belgium Archives. This was the results. 

This is Desiderius' search results. On the left is the search box. On the right results. Epoux is marriage so I clicked on it and found it was my ancestors! Credit: Belgium Archives

When I clicked on the magnifying glass, I got the following translated information. 

This backs up the information of my 2x great grandfather (top document). It gives me my 3rd great grandfather's date of birth, area, his occupation, same of his wife, and even my 4th great grandfather's name and date of death and area. I can now take this information and look it up at FamilySearch and make sure the originals back up what this document is telling me.
Credit: Belgium Archives

This is where the harvesting of information starts...and it can start to go quickly like a ball going down a steep hill.

You find out one bit of information and it gives you more and the process keeps repeating like the graph shows above.
Credit:

Then I took out blank paper and started to write down how everyone was linked and information. I also took copies of each entry I found. If I didn't know how they linked in, I still saved them, but continued to work on the links. I was using the FAN technique I discussed as above. After about a week, I had pages of information which linked and many entries from the Belgium Archives to figure out.

A section of what my FAN tree looked like as I was putting facts together. Credit J. Fitzgerald

Once I was sure I had as much linking up as I could, I then went to FamilySearch to look for the original documents to double check the information.

And you can see the by getting the original document, you also get more information. I've even found children who had died and no one had listed them at all. I'm not going to lie to you, but FamilySearch is not completely indexed, so many times you will have to go through the files page by page looking for information, which is how I came across some of those forgotten children. Sad, but true. I've also come across some documents which ancestors had signed as a witness.

This is a step by step process of finding the images on FamilySearch to search. This is due to them not being indexed, so you must go page by page.

Then you will be taken into the imagines where you can go page by page searching. 

It can lead to signatures too! 
Besides, how cool is it when you can see an ancestor's signature from the 1700s or 1800s?? Sometimes on the document, like the one above, of my 2x great grandfather, the signatures are on the side where the binding of the book are. The documents must have been binded after they were written.

However, other times they are right there and easy to read. This is my 4th great grandfather's signature about the birth of my 3rd great grandfather, Desire. This supports what was in the Belgium Archive.

Jacobus Josephus or JJ Gauquie (born 1767) has son Desiderius. JJ's signature is highlighted above. It's in French I believe.
My 4th Great Grandfather is JJ Gauquie.   Credit: FamilySearch