Jefferson County Genealogical Society held a workshop this weekend presented by Mary Kircher Roddy   Exel-lence in Genealogy.  I had noticed quite a few webinars lately were being presented on this subject and thought, “I know Excel, maybe this is something I should be looking into.” The class had a wide range of family historians from beginners to professionals along with a wide range of individuals familiar with Excel. Once we were through some of the basics of Excel in the remaining two hours Mary was able to show us lots of ways to use Excel for genealogy.

One of the cleaver things she showed us was how to insert the search results from Ancestry, Family Search and others into our spread sheet. Once we had done that we could sort the information by any of the fields.

So putting this into practice I was interested in finding all the Irish immigrants in Pike County Pennsylvania in the 1850. William L. Dougherty my 2x great grandfather had come from Ireland sometime prior to 1842. Understanding that rarely did an individual come by themselves to some arbitrary location, my sister and I had thought to investigate the others in the area to see if we could discover who William was, exactly when he arrived and perchance what became of him.

So I did a search of Ancestry’s 1850 Census of those born in Ireland living in Pike County, Pennsylvania. This is just a fraction of the individuals that I was able to import to an excel spread sheet. From this I can start researching and making notes on this data sheet about the individuals: when they came, who they came with,  where they came from, and where they where in later census.

The second tip I am putting into practice is the tracking of records. Currently I have a Document Log for each individual.

But if I combine those logs in a Spread sheet by families I might be able to see more patterns or holes.

I like to use colors to designate families. Blue my fathers fathers line and Red my mothers fathers line. It was a system that the original family research binders I bought utilized and I have stayed with it.

So now I can use colors to designate other patterns. This may help in finding those family members that went missing. I can already see that I might try looking at Port Jarves for Solomon in 1880.

i’ve used other programs such as Clooz but have spent time typing in data that I never got beyond the imput. What tools are you using to help handle data?