Do you ever come across some genealogical problems that are
pretty complex and a standard pedigree chart and group sheet
just can't help you map it out to help you solve your cases?
Are you looking for a tool that can help you analyze all of
these different clues to see how they interconnect?
Hi, I'm Devin Noel Lee and this is Family History Fanatics. In
a previous video, I showed some pretty interesting tools that
can help me analyze some information about individuals
and chew individuals that I was trying to compare. Those were
called mind maps. So, mind maps are great when you're writing
mind maps. You take a topic and then you break it into sub
topics and break it into subtopics and so on and so
forth and you tie these pieces of your subtoxics together and
it helps you write a paper Mind maps are also helpful in
engineering when you're trying to develop a process. You can
map everything out. Now, when I'm working on a case study in
genealogy, I like to call them clue webs because it's not that
there is a subtopic and a subtopic and a subtopic of a
person, there's all these different pieces of facts that
I can pull together in order to make a case and when one little
clue web overlaps another person clue web then sometimes
I can make relationships in that way and so whether you
call them mind maps or you call them clue webs. This is a
really cool tool to help you solve complex cases. I'm first
going to show you some examples of some clue webs that I have
used in teaching and sharing here on YouTube and then I'll
video, I shared this web to help me analyze a tree that I
discovered on Ancestry. com. I started with Charles and I
added his birth information then I added his marriage
information and notice I truncated some facts about his
children being born because the names and places and dates for
the children weren't as important as the fact that five
were born in Perry and five were born in caulking and in
the whole family moved over to Groveport. So, do you see how
the clue web doesn't have all of the details? It just has the
clues that I need to help me solve the cases of my family
history. Now, you can often take two clue webs and combine
them together to see how people interact or don't interact. So,
in this case, these two individuals do not look like
they interact and therefore, I can't create any of connecting
line and to me that lets me know that these individuals
don't belong together. In another case study that I have,
I talk about Earl Wiggins and William Geisler and somebody
named Cox and they're all buried in the exact same family
plot and the question is, are there any lines that connect
these three people together or they complete strangers and I
can put multiple clue webs on a screen in order to try to solve
my problem. Now, here you can see a husband and a wife, the
facts about the husband, the facts about the wife, the her
parents, his parents, two of their children and facts about
them. Notice that yes, you could find a lot of this
information on a group sheet but I'm truncating the facts to
see where things interset and then if I take this clue web
and put it on in place here then is there any information
that connect these individuals together and if it doesn't then
I know that this clue web goes over here and these individuals
do not intersect and therefore probably not related here's
another version of a clue web you have the person in the
center his parents on the left his wife and child on the right
and then facts about each of them notice here I was able to
add a resident's information. This is where they lived as a
family and to see if that is a piece of information that I
need to know to help keep him separate to keep this family
separated and here is a definitely complex clue web
that has a lot of people and then I can actually tag on more
facts. So, we have that William from the previous slide. We
have his parents and his siblings over here And then we
take his father and connect him to his grandfather and
grandmother. Oh and by the way she married him and oh by the
way these three people are buried in the same location.
And then we come down and we have William's mother and her
parents and hit her sibling and oh here's a sibling's spouse
and oh by the way did you know maybe there's some additional
information of how these people intersects and so these clue
can become very complicated to help you see the inner
relationships of people and such as this little fact right
here. He would be on a group sheet with this person. He
wouldn't be on a group sheet with his stepfather but it's
interesting to know the three of them are buried in the same
place. So, clue webs become pretty exciting things. So, how
do you make a clue web? Well, in Google, we can start a new
presentation. You could probably put it in any a Google
doc but I found the presentation works the best.
So, here I am in presentation. I'm going to get rid of these
pieces of information right here and I'm going to come over
here and I'm going to go click on shape. And go to shapes and
get the circle. There really isn't a oval, the oval and the
circle are the same. What you need to do in order to get that
circle to show up. Once again, go shapes, go to circle, hold
down your left mouse button, and drag it to create an oval
shape and once you release it, it looks like this. Now, if you
want to change the color, the infill color, you would come up
here to fill color and we can make it a yellow if we want.
Now, in order to put text inside here, we need to come up
to the text box and then we're going to draw a box right on
top there and we can type in Charles Gordon. You want to
make it larger, you can change the font, you can change the
size, you can change the color, whatever you need in order to
tell your story well, here we go. You can also align it to
the center. There you go. That's your first clue web.
Now, what I like to do is I like to center the words inside
the shape and so I left mouth click and hold the words until
I get the red cross beams and then I can let go and the
information's in the center. Now, another centering that
might need to be done is come up to this alignment and then
go to the middle and now the words are are in the middle.
One other trick, if you left mouth click on the words, hold
your shift key down if you're on a Windows machine and hold
click on the oval. Now, you have these two items selected.
Right mouse Click and press group and now these pieces go
together instead of one moving and the other moving later. Um
sometimes it doesn't hold the exact alignment when you click
on just different parts of it but generally speaking you can
mute the whole thing if that makes any sense. Okay so now
we're going to draw another bubble. So we know that he was
born in Pennsylvania. I'm going to come down here. I'm
going to draw an ovaly shape. And now it's on top. Well, I
want it to actually be below the name. So, I right mouse
click, go to order, and go send to back. Now that it's in the
back, then I can click on the text box, draw it like I did
before, type in Born 18 oh one and it was born in
Pennsylvania. Once again, align the information and I can left
mouse click, click on the oval, right click, group, and this
information is grouped together when it pops up if it pops up
then go to order send a back and now it's in the back so I
can decrease the size of the oval just because the birth
date isn't in this case as important as the name of the
individual I can right click copy right click paste and now
I have two ovals it always pops to be gift front to go order
send to back and now I can put the death date in who died
let's say 1873 in Ohio so let's say Charles gets married we can
write click copy right click paste and now I have Charles
over here and then I can just change the name to Jane Fickle
and now I have a bubble so if you want to link these two
individuals together what you need now is the line tool if
you over the oval shapes you can get these dots around the
shapes I usually don't like to use those so I will left mouth
click hold press the shift key because that makes the line
straight and then draw and release the line shape then
come up here to line weight and change it to three point fonds
or four four pixels or three pixels hold down your left
mouth button as you drag the line up once again, right click
order sent to back and now, I have Charles connected to Jane
with this line. You can always add more lines in the same
fashion. You can add more bubbles. I'm just repeating the
steps that I did before. Um let's say you want to have
children and there's three of them. You can draw another
line. You can draw two more line or three more lines. You
just keep drawing lines using the line tool just like so and
you can always move things around to line it up and I can
put a circle and then I can put three more circles for the
children and that's how you can start creating clue webs and
you can make em as complicated as you want. One last tool,
let's say you want to resize all of these or you want to
move all of these because you need to add some information
over here. If you hold down your left mouth button and you
get that crossbar, then, draw drag all over this rectangle
over all the parts that you want to grab together. Now,
everything's highlighted and you can hold down your left
mouse key and you can move things around or you can come
and see one that changes from a pointer to diagonal arrow. Now,
it can make things smaller. Now, the font size don't
doesn't change. So, you're going to come up here and have
to play with the font sizes a little bit. Um but there you
have it. That's just one of the tools that you can use to draw
some things that you'd like to see designs, we would be happy
to create a video for you. So, send us a video suggestion to
info at Family History Fanatics. com.