Examples of ways to use Clooz

Clooz is designed to meet your needs without forcing you to do things in a prescribed order. Use it in a way that feels natural to you. At the same time, once you determine your objectives in using Clooz, it’s a good idea for you to become familiar with the program features to allow you to work in the most effective manner. Let’s examine a few examples of how different users would best use Clooz.

Case Study #1 – Data already in a family tree software database

Joan is a new Clooz user who has been building Real estate or buildings is a Subject type in Clooz. This could be any type of property: land plot, farm, building, etc. her family tree using Family Tree Maker software for the last decade. She has gathered lots of data and has over a few thousand people in her family tree database. Much of the data (including censuses, vital records, immigration records, and church records) have been documented in Family Tree Maker as sources A source record in Clooz should be viewed as the higher level components of a source citation. Citation details are pulled from the citing Information Record., and physical copies of the documents have been filed according to document type. Joan loves to search and find new information, more so than filling out computer screens of information, so she also has accumulated a pile of copies of documents from her more recent research that has not yet been ‘processed’ into her Family Tree Maker database.

Joan is intrigued by Clooz’s features, but has serious concerns about retyping all of her document records into Clooz. She wonders how she might use Clooz.

Here’s how:

Since Joan already has a substantial amount of research already done, with people in her Family Tree Maker database, her first step should be to import those people and sources into Clooz using a GEDCOM file (since Clooz only presently supports direct importing from current versions of Legacy Family Tree, RootsMagic, Family Historian, and Ancestral Quest).

Joan decides that many of her ancestral lines have been sufficiently researched, and does not want to take the time to detail them further in Clooz at this time. Maybe someday when she has time, because she ultimately does want to use Clooz as the focus of her document repository Where a source document or item was found. This could be a physical library facility or online data provider.. While Clooz could easily help her locate files containing physical copies of the documents, she likes the idea of a paperless approach where images of her documents are always at her fingertips.

Dealing with her backlog of processing documents more recently found is Joan’s top priority. She enters these into Clooz, and uses the new feature for letting Clooz create new people for each one contained in the document. Then she can begin to make the decisions on whether these are the same people as those in her tree, and merge them together. Joan’s research techniques had matured over the years, and now she knew not to just throw people into her family tree without substantial analysis and proof. Once she considered it proven, she would enter the person in her family tree. She then exported the people, events and parent/child relationships via GEDCOM back to Family Tree Maker, using Family Tree Maker tools to resolve any duplication conflicts..

Finally, Joan knew that some of her ancestral lines were only partially complete. She then decided to enter the document information for those people into Clooz to allow for more thorough reporting and analysis, being able to see all of the evidence available to her. She already knew for sure that the people named in the documents were ones in her tree, so she used the traditional Clooz approach of linking existing people to the documents she entered. This saved the step of having to merge people records later. She was amazed to discover, like many Clooz users over the past years have reported, that during the process of entering the document information into Clooz, it forced her to pay attention to the details contained in the document, and in fact identified additional clues regarding her ancestors. Maybe she wouldn’t put off entering all her documents after all.

Case Study #2 – The Reformed Researcher

Frank has been gathering family tree information for a few years, and like Joan, uses lineage-linked software to create beautiful family tree charts. He doesn’t have a whole lot of document files, but there are two boxes of stuff under the table beside his computer. He has collected GEDCOM files from all over, where ever he could find them, and diligently enters the source of the GEDCOMs in his database. Sources are important you know. One year, Frank attended a National Genealogical Society Family History Conference in a city near his home. While listening to Joan give a talk on using document evidence to prove family relationships, he was just overcome with the realization his prize family tree database was, frankly speaking, garbage.

It was time for Frank to rebuild his family tree with adequate evidence and documentation. He saw a mention on Facebook to a program called Clooz. The notion of evidence-based analysis of information made perfect sense to him, besides, Clooz imported GEDCOM files.

Frank decided he would use Clooz as his primary research tool:

He would start with a clean new Clooz database and dig out those two boxes of stuff under the table to see if there was in fact, anything useful. He did find a few birth records and immigration documents from his great grandparents. Frank then used his new smartphone to make digital copies of the documents and setup a special folder directory to organize his digital file attachments into one general location on his computer. While looking at the list of files using the Windows Explorer program, he was able to simply drag and drop them into Clooz.

Frank was given a subscription to an online data provider, and after the little green leaf lit up, started doing searches for all sorts of documents and information. He was able to save digital copies of documents on his computer, and drag them into Clooz. He could even highlight the source citation information on the data provider’s web page and drag it into Clooz. It didn’t automatically get dissected and reformatted (wouldn’t that be nice), but at least the information was captured. He could then easily fill out Clooz’s form for the source by copy/pasting segments from what he had captured. Less typing is good he thought. As Frank was creating Information Records Information Records in Clooz hold the content information coming from a document or other source. These differ from a Source record that contains most of the citation information describing the docment, or the Repository record referring to the facility or online service where the document was found. in Clooz for each of the documentation items he found, he could setup any number of events and parent/child relationships for the people mentioned, at least as things looked using that particular information source. Other documents might show conflicting event details that he would later have to evaluate.

Using the documents Frank was entering, he entered the details related to each person listed in the document and let Clooz generate a new person record and link it to the document. After entering all the documents he could find that might relate to the family he was interested in, he printed himself a few reports and sat back to mull over what it all meant. Finally he was able to prove to himself that several of the documents related to the same person, so he merged those people together, and added a remark to the combined set of records detailing his logic. Joan would be proud he thought. He was now on the way to building a well-founded family tree.

Case Study #3 – The Professional

Elizabeth was a certified genealogist for many years. People would come to her with the most extremely difficult cases. One of her problem solving approaches was to do single surname studies in discrete geographic locations. She was proficient at using a spreadsheet program, but sometimes it just fell a bit short in terms of fully meeting her needs. She had an old copy of Clooz, but it was somewhat limited. Then she heard the new version 4 had all kinds of new features, with more flexibility to do what you need. She gave it a try.

Elizabeth decided to integrate Clooz into her work in several ways:

She used Clooz to record census records of a particular surname she was researching in a region of Pennsylvania. She captured digital images and attached them to each of the documents she recorded. Elizabeth found that treating census enumeration districts as ‘documents’ in Clooz seemed to work the best for her. Clooz version 3 allowed her to attach multiple digital files (one for each page) to the same document. The whole surname study was put in a database of its own. She could always merge the Clooz databases later if there was reason to look at all the data together.

Elizabeth found that the reports Clooz generated could be exported into a variety of file types. The Adobe pdf files were good, and other formats would allow further reformatting using her suite of office applications. She could include the generated reports in the overall report to her customer.

Since Elizabeth had all sorts of projects, she ended up with various external lineage-linked databases. She ended up importing individual records from many of the databases. Clooz could identify which file a person’s record came from and what their identification number was in the other database. This allowed her to be able to reference and locate people accurately between her various digital tools. She was convinced that Clooz belonged in her toolkit.

Case Study #4 - The Grandmother's scrapbooks

Margaret loved to collect pictures, school papers, newspaper clippings, and whatever else she could get he hands on related to her children and grandchildren. Over the years the family grew and she was finding more and more items to add to scrapbooks she had setup. Unfortunately, she had not imagined how big of a collection it would end up being, or even the number of extended family members that would ultimately be included. Her method of organizing things in annual scrapbooks was making it difficult to locate all of the relevant items for a particular person or family. She did have a friend who was a genealogy addict though, and this friend recommended using a program she used called Clooz to setup an index to all her scrapbooks. She decided to give it a try.

Margaret labeled the scrapbooks and created Source records in Clooz for each scrapbook, and then entered all of her family members into Clooz as Subjects Subjects are the objects you are gathering information about. In most cases with Clooz, this is people. However, Clooz supports several other types of subjects such as businesses, real estate/buildings, ships and artifacts.. That was all pretty easy. The more challenging part was going through each scrapbook and creating an Information Record in Clooz for each article, photo, or other item. As part of that record she would link in the various family members who were mentioned or shown in the item. She could have digitized the items to create digital scrapbooks, but decided the indexing would be sufficient for her immediate needs. Once completed, Margaret could then view lists of all the items (and their location in the scrapbook collection) for each person. Who knows she thought, maybe someday she'll dabble a little in her family history.

Case Study #5 - Inventory of Family Stories and Heirlooms

Francis has assembled a collection of family items that have been passed down over the years for earlier generations. A number of them had some stories associated with them, like the time Grandma Mable wore her favorite brooch to the square dance where she met Grandpa Fred, or Grandpa Barney getting in trouble for carving his initials in the stock of his dad's shotgun. She saw Clooz was now supporting artifacts Artifacts are one of the Subject types in Clooz. They are meant to represent physical objects that have some significance in your research or family history. as a Subject type, so she decided it was a good way to organize all the information.

She created Information Records for each of the family stories and cited the Source of where she heard or read about the episode. She then linked the Subject records These are records in the Clooz database representing the Subjects being researched, and contain summary information about the Subject such as the birth, marriage, and death dates for people. for all the people in each story to the record, along with the Subject record for the artifact itself. Now she could easily list all the artifacts a particular person was involved with, or all the people who had some interaction with an artifact. After dealing with all the artifacts she had, she kept on adding stories and linking the appropriate people to them. This was really helping to bring her family history alive.