GaGenWeb Archives family group sheet project

One of the first formats for recording family information that I ever came across was the family group sheet.

When my mom visited me in Salt Lake back in the early 1980s, we, of course, paid a visit to the granddaddy of all genealogical libraries, the big one in Salt Lake City. That was where I saw my first family group sheet. The library offered researchers blank ones for recording family information and I still have copies of some of those old forms in my files.

You probably can still get them at your local Family History Library if there is an LDS church near you.

They were printed on 8 1/2 by 14 paper (turned sideways) and contained enough blanks for a family with 12 children. Okay, sometimes it spilled over onto two sheets. One of my ancestors had 15 children.

The family group sheet is a great "one-family-at-first-glance" mechanism, because it contains information on only one family: the father, the mother and all their children. There are spaces for birth, death and marriage dates, the names of the parents of the mother and father, and the names of spouses of the children. If you wanted to go further, you would start another group sheet on each of the children and his or her spouse, which then became another family.

Most computer programs today offer the family group sheet format in addition to others for printing out and sharing your family information. It is still very popular, in addition to the descendancy format and the register report format.

Most of the non-computer people I have corresponded with sent me a family group sheet. It seems to be a common ground among Internet and non-Internet researchers.

The GaGenweb Archives has now taken the family group sheet to the Internet and a new project is offering family group sheets for Georgia families on the Web. It is still in its infancy but is growing by leaps and bounds every day. At last count, there were nearly 400 family group sheets that had been submitted to the site.

Why is this such a great thing? There are tons of "pedigrees" (family trees) on Rootsweb and Ancestry.com, you say? Well, this takes a little more work, folks. Some of those "pedigrees" are no more than the work of lazy people who find a family tree that has a common ancestor with theirs, download the information to their computer, "merge" it with their own "research," then add it to their online family tree.

Mistakes are constantly propagated. Right or wrong ... there it is. And some little beginner comes along, finds a family member in that family tree, and thinks the information is the gospel.

Extreme caution should be used when copying information from online resources such as those family trees. Many, of course, are the work of dedicated and fastidious researchers and are absolutely correct, but you have no way of knowing which is which. After you have searched online files for a while, you soon learn which researchers are credible and which are not.

I learned the hard way about three years ago ... a lesson I haven't forgotten. It took me almost six months to straighten out my Boyds after I accepted some bad information as fact. I now avoid this researcher's work like the plague.

I'm sure some of these online family group sheets contain erroneous information too, but since it takes a little more work to format and submit them, I'm hoping the "lazy" researchers won't want to bother with the project. The mistakes, therefore, would be honest ones, and the researcher can note when his or her information is in question. There is also a section at the bottom of each sheet for sources and notes.

Okay, down to the nitty gritty. How do you find this wonderful new site? First, go to the GaGenWeb site http://rootsweb.com~gagenweb/ (I'm going to give you a little more than you asked for and tell you about the archives too), and scroll down until you see the box on the left that says, "The US GenWeb Archives Project, Georgia Files." Click on that box and it will take you to the archives page.

Perhaps I'd better explain also that the GaGenWeb actually has two "parts" ... the regular county pages and the county archives pages. The regular county page may contain the county history, the names of other researchers with families in that county, a few county records and more "county-specific" information. The county archives site is for "public domain" information such as marriages, wills, censuses, land records, cemeteries and records that are public information. Entire marriage books have been transcribed and put on these pages. Both are very valuable sites.

Once you get to the archives page, there are little boxes which include topics of information that people have contributed. One of those boxes says, "Family Group Sheets" and that is where you want to go. Click on that and it will take you to the family group sheet page where all the information (so far) has been recorded.

There are boxes for the first letter of each surname and you can browse to your heart's content. If you want to submit your family group sheet, click on text line that offers that option, and it will give you a blank family group sheet with explanations on how to fill it out and submit it. Different coordinators handle different counties and they are all listed at the bottom of the archives home page.

Bettie Wood is the person responsible for doing all this hard work on the Family Group Sheet Project and I'm hoping she won't get overwhelmed with it all. I have submitted several family group sheets on my family and am in the process of completing more. I have also contributed a couple of wills and partial cemetery information on those cemeteries I have "walked" myself. Do NOT submit information from census or cemetery books done by others, as that is not your work. They can get you for copyright infringement if you do.

I hope you find this site helpful and I encourage you to submit your family research to this project.

If you're looking for your Georgia ancestors, have a genealogy tip, or have a local family history to share, write to The Citizen, Drawer 1719, Fayetteville, GA 30214; e-mail jkilgore@thecitizennews.com or jodiek444@aol.com. I'll be happy to share it with others and maybe help you "find your folks."

Until next week, happy hunting!

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