Why I Seek Typed Obituaries

Why I Seek Typed Obituaries

This morning a frequent contributor to the Ice Family page on Facebook asked why I am typing and sharing obituaries.

Here's my reply.

Here's how I do genealogy. I use a genealogy program [RootsMagic] to record the information I obtain about each person. Each person can have a Note field where "text" can be stored. When I obtain an obituary I transcribe the information to "text" and save it in the Note field. This allows me to create narrative ancestor or descendant reports that show everything I know about a particular line. These reports are what I call, genealogy. In my opinion storing digital images in a genealogy database wouldn't work very well when one wants to print out the information.

Collecting "raw" data is an important aspect of the genealogy hobby, but in and of itself will never produce a readable genealogy. The only way this can be accomplished is to process the "raw" data and enter it into your genealogy program of choice.

Dick Henthorn
12 Jan 2018