Building a FAN Club

I've been struggling with how best to build a FAN club for each of my relatives. No, I don't mean a screaming bunch of groupies but of course, by FAN Club I am referring to Elizabeth Shown Mills description of "Family, Associates and Neighbors". These can become very important in helping to sort out your family and if you haven't read through her QuickSheet, The Historical Biographer's Guide to Cluster Research (the FAN Principle), I'd highly recommend it (and anything else by Ms. Mills.)

I use FamilyTree Maker and I typically track witnesses, census neighbors and any other names I come across in my research right in the Fact note. But I've found this doesn't give me the bigger picture - it only shows me what's going on with that particular record.

So I'm going to try a two-pronged approach. First, I will continue to include this information within the fact note and tie it to the fact it comes from. This will be the primary source of the information.

Secondly, I've created a new Fact and called it FAN Club. Its a description fact only and my plan is to add the names and the date and fact associated in the Notes field. I'll try to alphabetize as I go along. That way I should be able to see, for example, if the Jones family appeared as the next door neighbor through more than one census or whether a person witnessed more than one event. And then I only have one place to go to when I'm trying to remember why someone's name sounds familiar.

I've debated as to whether I should keep a separate paper record of these FANs - I used to do this sporadically. But I've decided that it's probably not necessary as I'll be sure the FAN Club fact prints out when I print out the paper record of each individual.

I'm hoping that this more structured approach to the family FAN Club will produce some brick wall breakthroughs.