A Pennsylvania Dutch Genealogy
the genealogy & family research site of Kris Hocker
Are you a fan of Scrivener? Do you use it for your writing projects? Would you be interested in using it to write your blog posts? Here’s an article discussing how to use Scrivener as a complete blogging system.
I’ve been working on an index of the online Lancaster County deed books for a while now. And it’s taken significantly longer than I’d expected. Compiling the index didn’t take long. Formatting it, however, has taken ages.
Mostly because I kept changing my mind.
My goal was to make the index easy to use in both printed and electronic forms. An ebook book or PDF can be searched, but a printed book needs to be easy to skim—especially an index. So, initially I decided to organize the index in a table format reminiscent of the original grantor and grantee indexes produced by the county.
Starting from my table in Microsoft Excel, sorted by surname, deed book and page, I opened and saved the file as a Word doc, then opened it in Pages for editing.1 Then I modified the table to create a separate table for each letter of the alphabet, adding a table header to each. Not too bad, although the font size was fairly small in order to get the information to fit nicely on the page.
Unfortunately, because ebooks don’t accept tables, I needed to format the manuscript differently for them. This entailed removing all the table formatting, changing table cells to tabs, then replacing the tabs with either a comma and space, em dash, or carriage return to create a long list.
This was time consuming and ultimately created a very long document. Which then had to be checked against the original “print” format to ensure that I hadn’t inadvertently messed up any of the data during the conversion. And while reviewing it, I found it difficult to easily identify where the in list one surname stopped and the next began.
Worse—I, then, decided to include additional information for each entry. Oh, the headaches that followed that decision.
Did I already add that information to this file or that file? What about the grantee table? Did I add it there? And what the heck was going on with the table? It didn’t fit on the page anymore. I could drop the font size, but then nobody would be able to read it without a magnifying glass!
I finally decided that two formats was too many. Too much to format, too much to edit. I would just have to find a way to make the list more legible and use it for both electronic and print versions of the book.
After some trial and error, I finally found a format I liked that I felt looked good both in print and in the kindle previewer.
I hope you will agree!
The book An Index to the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Online Deeds, Books A-D, 1729-1760 will be available as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and in print at Lulu and Amazon. Release date to come.
I‘ve just finished indexing my latest writing endeavor “The Huber-Hoover Families of 18th Century Lancaster County.”
This book is a compilation of raw data I’ve gathered and includes deed abstracts, warrant and patent lists, and last will & testament transcriptions for Hoovers across Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in records from 1729 through 1800.
It represents a large chunk of my Hoover surname research and the data has been instrumental in helping to build a clearer picture of these early families. I hope it will help you!
Stay tuned for the publication information or sign-up for the mailing list for the book “Hoover Families of Lancaster County.”
If you’re going to be researching your family, there are some books that you must have. These are not just the books that I’ve found useful, but books that I’ve returned to again and again.*
The Red Book: American State, County & Town Sources contains much need background information on the genealogy resources for every state. It provides information on each county, including when it was created, its parent county or counties, and the first year Deed and Probate records were recorded for that county.
You’ll also find contact information for archives, libraries and genealogical societies in that state, as well as a state map which shows the counties and it’s main city.
The Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Census provides a map for each state showing the counties enumerated in each census year overlaid on the state’s current counties. If you’re a visual person, like me, it’s a great way to understand how the boundaries shifted and counties were added over time.
Evidence: Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian is absolutely a must have for the family researcher. Knowing the source for any piece of information is the ONLY way to determine it’s value. Elizabeth Shown Mills not only explains how to cite a source correctly, but how to analyze that source. Very important stuff!
The answers to your family research questions can seldom be found in books. And when they are they are only what that author knew at that time. Sometimes, they are right. Sometimes, they are partially correct. And sometimes, they are flat out wrong. That’s why you need to know the source of that information, so you can follow-up, verify it, and if necessary build on it. I’ve found several instances where follow-up research on information I felt to be reliable proved incorrect with new information! (Okay, getting off the soap box now.)
Of course, once you’ve done your research, you want to present to to the world, right? Or at least to family. And you want it to be the best. I’ve found Patricia Law Hatcher’s book Producing a Quality Family History to be very helpful in putting my research together in a cohesive, readable format.
Now if I could only find the time to finish the darn book!
* Links to Amazon from this page are affiliate links. If you purchase one of these books, I will earn a small commission. It will not change the final price of the book to you, though.