The research log, or how I stopped searching the same index four times

March 2026 · 3 min read

Somewhere in my fourth year of this hobby I discovered that I had searched the same marriage index for the same couple four separate times, spread over about two years, and found nothing each time. Each search felt new. The fifth time I noticed the same scrap of paper in a folder with the same note on it, and I finally understood that my memory was not a filing system. That was the day I started a research log.

The log is a plain spreadsheet, one row per search, and every row has the same columns:

The date I did the search.
Where I looked: the repository, the collection or record series, the volume or roll, and how I accessed it.
Exactly what I searched for, including the spellings and date ranges I tried.
What I found, including the words nothing found when that was the result, with a note on how complete the index or film appeared to be.
What I should try next as a result.

The hard part was accepting that a negative search is a result worth writing down. It feels like failure, so the instinct is to close the window and move on. But “searched the county marriage index 1820 to 1850 under three spellings, no entry” is useful information: it tells future me not to repeat it, and it is a small piece of evidence that the marriage happened somewhere else, or earlier, or was never recorded.

The log also forced me to cite properly. For every document I now record the repository, the collection, the volume and page, and the image number if I viewed a digital copy, in the same format every time. Early in the hobby I saved images with names like “deed2” and no note of where they came from; I spent a miserable weekend last winter re-finding the sources for forty of those, and three I never did find again.

One more habit came out of this. Before I open any search box, I give myself fifteen minutes with the log and the person’s timeline to write down what question I am actually trying to answer and where the answer is most likely to live. Fifteen minutes feels slow when the search box is right there. It has saved me dozens of hours of wandering through records that could not have held what I needed. The log now runs to about 1,400 rows. It is the least romantic object in the whole hobby and the one I would rescue first.