A genealogical research principle:
To learn about an ancestor and his/her family, one must accumulate data from a variety of documents. Most documents also include names of other people the ancestor knew -- his Family, Associates, and Neighbors -- or his F.A.N. club, a term coined by Elizabeth Shown Mills.
To know all you can about the ancestor, it is often necessary to do research on the F.A.N. club, thereby adding more data, more facts, more clues.
As more and more is learned, it can be difficult to keep straight all the facts and clues about an ancestor and his F.A.N. club.
The purpose of this blog:
To explore the power of and discover a format for using an Excel spreadsheet to store, to see, and to sort an abundance of data without information overload.
Sorting can be done by name, by date (create a timeline), by place, and by document type (create a type of research log), and by any combination of these.
You can also link to the document image or a transciption.
And that is the tip of the iceburg.
