The Research Plan: Fast-Track Your Search Success

What is your order of operations when you do family history research? Where do you start? How do you know where to search, and what to do next? How do you know what records are even available and relevant to your search? How do you stay on task when there can be new juicy details in every record you find?

A research plan can be the answer to all of these questions.

If you’d like to get yourself a copy of the template I use to plan all of my own research, you can snag it here. Just like I did with my research log template, I’ve filled in this template in red with examples to help you see exactly what I’m talking about to get started. (A research plan and a research log work best as a team to map out and record your research.)

The explanation of what’s in this template and how I use it is completely free. This guide can be paired with my template or used to build your own, if you’re more the DIY type.

Heading
I’ve got a spot to fill in your name (the researcher) in case you want to share this with anyone else and the ancestor(s) you’re building a plan to research. This can be one person, one family, etc.

Objectives
What are your goals? What are you hoping to learn with this research? You may only have one objective for a particular ancestor, or you may have several that relate to the same person or family, which could easily be researched concurrently, or which logically follow one another. Some researchers prefer short bullet points while others prefer to form their research objectives as questions. There are other examples in the template but some I’ve worked on recently include
What was the full legal name of Rheba Hinton’s husband?
Did John Henry Albright ever become a citizen of the United States?
Identify the parents of Robert Manly; Identify Robert’s grandparents; Identify as many of Robert’s siblings as possible.

Pre-Research
Before I begin digging into records, I always find it helpful to do a bit of what I call pre-research on the area and era inhabited by the people I'm planning to research. What records are available? What significant dates do I need to keep in mind, such as when a county was formed, when a state started keeping birth records, etc. My favorite resource for this is the FamilySearch Wiki.

This research can also include anything else you’ll want to know before you get started, like research on the geography of an area, migration routes your ancestor may have travelled, or historical events that may have impacted their lives. Recently I did some reading about The Expatriation Act of 1907 to see how it may have impacted my 2nd great-grandmother’s citizenship status so I would know whether or not I should spend time looking for a renaturalization record for her. 

What to Search and Where to Find It
This is the heart of your research plan. This is where you lay out what records you’re going to search. This is where your research ceases to be a slow, random meander through Ancestry.com and becomes an intentional fast track to the information you want to find. 

Think about what you want to know and the types of records that will provide those details, or clues to help you find them. For example, you want to know when someone was born, you may be able to look up their birth certificate. If they were born before their state kept official birth records (this is where your pre-research comes in handy!), what else might tell you that? Full dates of birth are often listed on marriage records, death records, military draft cards etc. Ages or years of birth that can help you narrow it down are often listed in census records, obituaries, and so many more. You just need to look at what’s available and make a list of what collections you want to search. 

For online research, the Online Genealogy Records pages of the FamilySearch Wiki are a great place to start. They give a compilation of some of the biggest and best record collections for a given place, and they’re organized by record type. I use the Indiana Online Genealogy Records page often. These pages are by no means an exhaustive list of online resources, but they’re a fantastic jumping off point. Individual websites also have their own invaluable card catalogs listing all of their record collections. Create a list of the records you plan to search and be specific! List the specific censuses you plan to search, not just “census records.” During which available US censuses did this person/family live? Were there state censuses taken during their lives in the states where they lived? Making this list digitally allows you to copy and paste links to record collections you plan to search so you can easily click back to them later, instead of leaving a thousand tabs open.

I like to list sources to search separated by research objective. However, in many instances, the same record collections will be useful for multiple objectives within a project. This is only one way you may choose to organize your research outline. Another method I like is to list the record collections you plan to search in one column, and using a second column to note which objectives will be relevant to each collection, which details a record/collection might contain, etc. In other words, why are you searching those records? How will they advance your knowledge toward meeting your objective?

Online research is a great place to start because the records available online are easily accessible at any time and you can do a ton of searches from different sources back-to-back. But don’t forget to consider offline resources! In a perfect world, every record would be available online from the comfort of your home. Maybe one day we’ll get there. (A girl can dream, right?) But that’s just not the case. Paper records take a truly massive amount of time and money and knowledge and resources and planning and people and cooperation to properly digitize. (I used to do this for a living and it was the best job I ever had, besides coaching you!) Only so many records can be going through this process at a time. So while we patiently wait for everything in the whole wide world to come online, sometimes we need to contact or visit an archive, the repository where the original paper document is physically held. It takes more time and effort (and sometimes a fee), but the fact that your ancestor’s birth record isn’t available on Ancestry or FamilySearch or MyHeritage doesn’t mean it’s not out there for you to find, and that find is worth it. There is a very special satisfaction that comes from receiving an envelope in the mail with a copy of your ancestor’s original documents and all of the new information they may contain. Start with online research, by all means, but don’t forget to consider offline resources in your research plans.

Once you’ve got a decent list of sources, start your research! Go! Find! Win!  

Changing Course
Something to keep in mind is that your plans will change, at least some of the time. Being on a fast track doesn’t mean that you will never need to change trains on the way to your final destination. If I build a research plan to search for a person’s date of birth and the names of their parents and their grandparents, and then find out the person was born in a different state or country than I thought, the collections I will choose to search for their ancestors will likely be very different. That is okay!! That is the nature of discovery. The same thing happens to authors and scientists and historians of all sorts. You can revise this plan as much as you need at any time; it’s there to guide you, not to rigidly dictate your every move. For this reason, some researchers only write a plan for one objective at a time. Do whatever works best for you. 

I love a good research plan because it keeps me on task. It gives me an itemized list of sources so I can logically move from one search to the next without having to figure out what to do after every single step. It gives me logical breaks in the research when I need to stop working for the day, and then I know where to pick back up when I have more time. It also helps me to make sure I don’t miss any important sources where my information might be hiding. Going down the list in order gives a logical flow to my research and it keeps me from jumping willy-nilly down off-topic research rabbit holes. (We’ve all been there.)

I’ve gone into a lot of detail here, but this does not have to be a long and complicated process. If there’s a lot of pre-research and I’m working in an area where I haven’t done much research, I’ll do more pre-research and spend an hour creating a research plan for a project where I’m planning to spend 20 hours of research. If it’s a smaller personal project for my own family tree where I know the area and the records, I might spend 15-20 minutes refreshing some details and compiling a To Search list.

Really, you could do this on a sticky note. I don’t recommend the sticky note because these can be helpful to reference later. I do recommend my template because it’s a slim, simple, organized way to work through everything I’ve just explained. I’ve tweaked this over the years as different elements have or haven’t worked for me and I wholeheartedly believe that it can work for you too. And if you’d like more help with research plans or anything else, don’t hesitate to reach out or to set up a one-on-one session with me.