I Love This Name - Rollin Coffee Lykins

I Love This Name - Rollin Coffee Lykins (about 1836 to maybe 1877)

I just love saying it. I think "Rollin" is a colloquial form of Roland - historically one of Charlemagne's knights (according to BabyNamesPedia I am right, but I don't know how much I trust this). In our family it is pronounced "raw-lin", not "role-in".

My source records for some of my families in my Legacy Family Tree database became corrupted after a hard-drive crash a few years ago, so I decided to check and re-enter some of the records again this week. Rollin's family was the last one on my list.

When I checked the family in my Legacy database I discovered that there were a lot of census records I did not have for this family. This chart shows the family before I added the census records and other documents I found.

Issues:

• Rollin and Sarah have shaky birth and death dates
• Sarah has no parents
• there are fifteen children
• most children have no spouses 
• no death dates
• calculated birth dates
• very few sources
• many of those sources are questionable
• poorly written (before I owned Evidence Explained)
• derivative or indirect in nature - not original or primary

Fortunately I have a great tool for helping me deal with these issues.

Last year I began putting families in census tracking charts on Google Sheets. It has transformed my research. At a glance I can tell if...

• a family migrated as a group, or if the borders changed around them. 
• they lived close together. 
• there may be a misattributed family member: someone is on the family list, but they never show up on the census, even by another name.
• someone's age jumps around illogically.
• there are gaps where children may be missing.
• there are "too many" children to fit into a time frame.
• kids show up after dad is dead, or mom past child-bearing (could be grandchildren or foster kids)

This is the sheet I currently have for Rollin's family after a day of looking up census records. (This will change as I find more census records).

Rollin Coffee Lykins census tracking chart

I programmed my sheet to automatically fill in ages in each census year when I put in birth and death dates.

I color code everything. It really helps me see patterns. When I do not have a death date, I set the person's age to 100, so that I can see how old they would be in each census year.

The blue columns show when the family was listed under Rollin as head of household, dark pink when his wife Sarah was head of household. The colored rows show when each child went out to found their own households.