Age does funny things to you. Gravity aside, it’s also helped me realize just how much I was personally affected by those events we studied in school. For example, I was always told that my great-grandfather left Austria-Hungary to avoid conscription. What I didn’t know until I started checking dates was that World War I was the bigger trigger.

I thought about this again on Friday as I was watching Who Do You Think You Are? I was quick to make the Salem, Massachusetts link – the witch trials were one of the more interesting things I recalled from high school history, although I may have learned more about them from literature and reruns of Bewitched. Still, if I found Salem in my family tree, you bet I’d start searching for links to witches. The Gold Rush, however, threw me off. Although I currently live in the West, I still don’t immediately connect 19^th-century trips to California to searching for gold.

Genealogists have a suggestion for people like me who don’t recall all of those names, dates, and events from history. Put everything on a timeline. Start with an ancestor and create notations above the dateline of that person’s life. Include places of residence, dates children were born, education, occupation, and everything else you know. Note historical events below the line. If your history has become a little rusty over the years, you can find fantastic history sources at sites including The History Channel (http://www.history.com/), Digital History (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/), and even Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com/). Also read local historic newspapers to add events that may have occurred near your ancestor’s home.

With a timeline in front of me, I would have quickly guessed that Sarah Jessica’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was off to California to strike it rich, and then I could have searched for documents that proved this true. In my own family, I could see which of my relatives might have fought in the Civil War so I can know who might have related pension records. I could determine if there was a political reason for my Italian ancestors to come to America and if the social climate in Italy had changed 15 years or so later when a few of them returned home. And the list goes on and on.

By the way, if you missed the Sarah Jessica Parker’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, you can catch it here. And be sure to watch this Friday, when it’s football legend Emmitt Smith’s turn.

When I first started using Family Tree Maker, I didn’t bother doing much with my media items. I was just happy if they were in my tree and linked to the right people. But as my family tree grew larger and larger and I had hundreds of items, I realized I needed a system. I started taking advantage of the ability to assign categories to each item.

Family Tree Maker comes with some default categories and I created a few of my own.

Have any of you created categories that you find particularly useful? Or deleted ones you didn’t feel you needed?

The next step I took was to add more specific details to captions. Instead of 10 photos titled “Phoebe Gedge,” I now have captions like “Phoebe Gedge in the 7th grade,” and “Phoebe Gedge at her U of U college graduation.” I also changed the way I labeled records and documents. Instead of death certificates being labeled differently for each individual, every record now has a caption consisting of a heading and a name (for example, Death certificate – Herbert Gedge, Obituary – Harold A. Reed, Tombstone – Lorine Bobbitt).

How do you use captions? Do you ignore them? Add lots of details? Have your own identification system?

Now you’ve read about my system. I’d like to hear how you organize your media files in Family Tree Maker. What has worked for you? What has been a disaster? I look forward to reading your comments—maybe it will give me an excuse to organize one more time.

When it comes to genealogy, it’s the juicy stories that really hook me, which is probably why I immediately jumped to speculation and scandal. Never once did it cross my mind that the obituary might be wrong (c’mon, it was in a newspaper – those are always reliable sources, right?).

I should know better. Seriously, how many times have I looked at two census records for the same person, different decades, and found a discrepancy in birth years? I know to chalk it up to bad reporting, get a second opinion, another record that helps me figure out exactly which date is right. But for some reason I never thought that could happen in an obituary.

Natalie Cottrill of ProGenealogists, who provides Sarah Jessica with the obituary and the documents that prove the obituary wrong in Friday night’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, summed it up nicely for me. “John’s date of death from his son’s obituary is a good example of why it is important to put more weight on primary source information than on secondary information,” she told me. Primary sources, said Natalie, are recorded close to the time of the event. Ideally the information in a primary source is reported by someone who witnessed the event, who has firsthand knowledge of what occurred. Birth records, draft registration cards, even a passenger list (at least in regard to arrival information) – those are primary sources. Obituaries, on the other hand, summarize a life and are written after the fact by someone other than the deceased. What’s stated in one can provide important clues but may not be perfectly accurate, particularly in regard to an event that occurred six decades earlier.

Lesson learned. From now on I’ll consider the origin of the information I’m looking at before I deem it absolute fact. And I’ll let those wonderfully scandalous stories that I conjure up merely encourage me to dig for better proof so I know that they’re right (or wrong).