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8 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for The Families Next Door Were Never Strangers
The enumerator who walked a southwestern Virginia hollow in 1860 moved cabin to cabin in the order the road gave them to him, recording the sequence of a neighborhood as precisely as any surveyor could have drawn it. Most researchers pull one line from that page and close the tab. The deed witness, the marriage bondsman, the man who bought the plow at the estate sale are still there on the image, in the households above and below the one line that got copied out.
What's Inside
- Six-step census neighbor analysis workflow, from opening the full census image through logging confirmed connections in companion records
- Pattern interpretation guide covering recurring surnames across census decades, disappearing households, age-match candidates for wives' maiden families, and adjacency near enumeration district boundaries
- Tools and repository guide for FamilySearch, Stephen Morse's One-Step pages, National Archives ED maps, The Settlement Project, and btdeed, with access notes and research tips for each
- Neighbor tracking log for recording full neighborhood households by census year
- Surname recurrence tracker spanning eight census decades
- Cross-reference log for connecting census neighbors to deed witness lists, marriage bonds, estate appraisers, estate sale buyers, and court appearances
- Notes pages