Sound Genealogical Practices Lead to Great Family Stories

I was excited to receive the first comments on my new blog. My reply to one of these comments has given me the topic for my latest post.

Heather Kuhn Roelker said... This is an interesting idea, to pull together the statistics of your ancestors. So sad that the infant mortality rate was so high. Based on these numbers it would really not have been pleasant to be a woman around 1900. Thank you for sharing this.
She was commenting on my Aug 23rd post; Snap shot of my Female ancestors that Immigrated to the USA from Ireland & Scotland, listed on the 1900 USA Census.

I replied…I got the idea when I was transposing data from various sources. I started with an individuals Birth, Baptism, Marriage, Death and Census records. Then I merged all of the entries chronologically by Family group. That's when the info pops. The number of births by mothers at young ages. The number of deaths in a Family Group, in a small time frame. The age and number of children with occupations of Mill worker. etc...
If you over lap Historical Time Lines you can see the causes, such as epidemics, wars, etc..
Read some Historical Fiction about the same time frame and it all comes together.