Madness Monday - Moving on with the William Ballenger Family

When I started this blog, I was using the Madness Monday theme to discuss one of my difficult families, that of William Harrison Ballenger.  Each week I was discussing one member of the family.  Life got busy and I had to suspend the posts.  Well, now I've uncovered some new information so I am going to take a slightly different tact.  One of the things I would like to try out is something I learned in Pamela Boyer Sayre's workshop, "Synchronized Research and Reporting" at the NGS Salt Lake City conference; write as you do your research.  Well I'm already behind, but I'm going to try and use Monday's to write about some of the items that are being discovered regarding the Ballenger family. 

For an overview you can check posts here and here.  I'll wait until you return...

One of my original goals with this family was to identify the alleged 12 children of William and Lucinda.  I have accomplished this.  Here's the family group sheet.  I want to acknowledge The Shy Genealogist for her posts on how to do some great things like this form in Word or Excel.

I was tempted to use a family group sheet from my genealogy program but I like this table format a little better.  It was an interesting excercise in that putting this form together manually forced me to evaluate each piece of evidence rather than just taking the easy road and printing off and posting the FGS.  That's why there's so many "probably," "circa," and "or" statements.  Much of the evidence is not yet conclusive in my mind.

Next week we'll look at the newest Iowa state census record I found on this family.

By the way, if you think this might be your family or are just interested, please contact me, I would love to share information and sources.

© 2010, copyright Michelle Goodrum