How I use my Genealogy Software

When I started library school and sat in my first archives class my classmates and professor were appalled when I disclosed that I filed copies of my genealogy records in more than one place. For example, a marriage record was filed in both the groom and the bride’s family’s folders. I simply had not decided upon a standardized methodology for filing my paper records yet. At least not one I could remember and subsequently recall within a few seconds. I’m sure many genealogists have elaborate filing systems and treat brides and grooms as “couples” or a specific “family unit” to which only ONE copy of a marriage record would be attributed. But in my mind, that would require remembering who each bride or groom married, more specifically, the groom’s name and without that, I wouldn’t be able to put my hands on the folder. So early on I decided to treat each person as their own individual and thus, they each got a copy of their marriage record.

So as you can see, redundancy is not new to me, nor is it necessarily a bother or inconvenience. So with that said, I would like to share a little bit about how I use my genealogy database. I have evaluated Family Tree Maker, Legacy Family Tree and RootsMagic and found them to be very similar in what I like to do with my software. I eventually settled on RootsMagic because of the ability to take it with me on a flash drive. The way I use my genealogy software has been evolving and continues to evolve throughout the years. Which is one reason why I have been hesitating to share what I do with everyone. I didn’t want to come across as a mad woman. Because frankly, I still haven’t decided how I want to do things yet. But oh well, you got to start somewhere and I think it’s important to share and to read about what others are doing and how they are doing it.

Speaking of, Susan Clark of the Nolichucky Roots blog originally started this thread with her “Getting Down to Basics” post in which she asked for people to offer their reasons and ideas for using a genealogy database. She got a lot of great responses. Check out the comments to her post to see what others had to say. I have posted links to other blog posts below.

Ok, so here goes my whackamole approach at trying to give you all of the reasons why and how I use my genealogy database:

1.       It’s a database and it’s searchable. So when I need to look someone up, I just type in their name and it finds them. It does it much faster than Ancestry.com’s online family tree.

2.       My  place names are indexed in addition to my last names. So if I am attending a conference or planning a research trip to Oregon County, Missouri, I can run a report that will tell me all of the people I have associated with Oregon County, Missouri or in Missouri, period. Be sure to watch the Legacy Family Tree video or webinar on how to enter your place names in such a way that cities and towns in Oregon County, Missouri will also be captured in the report. This applies to all software packages. I, unfortunately, have not implemented this organization schema yet, have you?

3.       I use it to manage my sources to document each event. Here is a screenshot of a birth fact for my 2^nd great-grandfather, James Franklin Lasiter. I have 9 sources for his birth date and place. A lot of people wrote about their wish lists for software. If I had to request a change for RM4, it would be that they include the detailed text in the summary box here at the top where it says “Details.” And for all I know, this may be different in RM5 that was just released. As it is now in RM4 you have to click on the source in order for the detail text to be displayed in the bottom right hand box.

4.       Linda McCauley mentioned Research Notes in her post “How I Use my Genealogy Database” using Legacy Family Tree. We have a similar feature in Rootsmagic 4, which is a report called Research Notes that you can run for each person. It is a breakdown of each source and how it relates to each fact and includes notes and so forth. The only problem I have with it is that it puts the name of the source as a footnote and the report itself lists simply a date and place and then a note. For this to work, you would have to include the name of the source in the actual detailed text of the footnote. So I don’t use this feature. But if it worked the way I would like it to work, it could probably be very powerful. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

5.       One thing I’ve started doing is adding census reports as events, in addition to birth, marriage, death, burial, and occasionally occupation. This makes for easily being able to determine when and where my ancestors were enumerated and this event shows up ok on the narrative report. I have tried to add other source-like events such as obituaries, but found they did not display well (or at all) on narrative reports. This could be rectified if I played with my custom settings more. What RM4 lacks in being able to copy and paste citations between family members, it gains in being able to assign a census report to multiple people in a family. I have found this feature to be very helpful and time-saving. I enter the census as an event for the head of house. I then share it with the other members of the household. I enter the information for the census into the census notes and I add a source. When this event is shared with other members of the house, the census note and source citation is automatically entered into their events list. The only difference between the head of house and the rest of the household is that the census note for the head of house is displayed on his or her report, but not on the report of those that the census is shared with. The report simply says “He appeared in the household of John Riley Lasiter in the census in Jun 1880 in Tomlinson, Scott, Arkansas, USA” with a footnote pointing to the citation. Because of this, I make sure to copy the census note information into the general notes of the household members. I usually do this anyways. This is one of the reasons why I say I engage in some redundancy!

6.       Speaking of redundancy. When I first started working with my database back when I was using Family Tree Maker, I used to put all of my information into the citation/footnote, including my analysis and the full text of the item being cited. This is what it used to look like. And unfortunately I still have a LOT of these left in my database:

When I transferred my database over to Rootsmagic, something happened and now I am no longer able to run reports using footnotes that are “that long.” So I have been trying to chop things up a bit more and use the event notes, general notes, and footnotes as separate entities. Unfortunately because I had been doing things for so long and had accumulated so much data, it is very difficult to change it all even if I were to come up with a standardized way of doing things. The two concerns I always had were this: I wanted to be able to easily pull my research notes and analysis out of my database quickly. And if it is scattered between birth notes, death notes, source citation notes, etc., that always seemed like a daunting task. I also wanted to be able to site my sources on my own just in case my footnotes did not work; as was the case when I transferred to RM. So I often built my source citations and then copied them into my notes. But that just cramped the readability of my reports. Especially when the demand to share with others increased. So now I use a hybrid system. I copy everything into my general notes, that way I can easily extract the information and copy and paste into a word document if I have to. Information entered into the rest of the program relies on my program's ability to export to a report. 

7.       Census Reports: When I used FTM, I used to include the entire census report in my citation because it was easier to copy and paste the citation to each member included in that household. Now I only include the line relating to the person being cited. I include information about a census report in the general notes always. This is what my census report looks like:

1910 Big Apple Twp., Oregon Co., MO

Taken 28 Apr 1910, Line 67, dw 130, fm 133

William Peters, head, 35 yo (b. abt 1875), M1 10 yrs (abt 1900), IL Unk IL, educated yes, rents a house, farm laborer, can read and write

Dora Peters, wife, 35 yo (b. abt 1875), M1 10 yrs (abt 1900), 5/7 kids living, AR Unk unk, cannot read or write

Herbert Peters, son, 9 yo (b. abt 1901), MO IL AR, can read, but c/n write

Danie Peters, dau, 5 yo (b. abt 1905), MO IL AR

Vibert Peters, son, 3 yo (b. abt 1907), MO IL IL

Nova Peters, dau 1 8/12 (b. abt 1908), MO IL IL

Mary Peters, dau, <1yr (b. abt 1909), MO IL IL

NARA Film T624, Roll 804, FHL Film 1374817, Page 7B, ED 117

[The last 3 children's mother's place of birth is listed as IL, but this must be a mistake as Dora was born in AR]

This format is easy for me to read. I add the approximate year of birth in parenthesis. Now that I include my census report information in my general notes, I no longer need to include all of the information for each household member in my citations. Now I only include the information pertinent to that household member. 

And this is what my citations look like:

It clearly states her name, age, and place of birth. I can click through each census that is cited to see if there are any differences. If I did not have this information included in this footnote, I would have to go back to this person’s general notes to see what this particular census report said for her name, age, and place of birth.

With regard to redundancy and census reports, the head of house inevitably will have the census report show up twice on his or her narrative report. This is fine by me. I would rather have too much information than not enough.

8.       I’m guessing this post has gone on long enough, so I will summarize here.

·         I add everything I know about a person in the general notes, including transcripts of death certificates and obituaries, census reports, land records, etc.

·         I have just started entering census reports as their own events and I “share” them with household members.

·         I provide source information for items included in my general notes, although the citations are not complete as I leave it up to the footnotes to do that job.

·         I cite every source for every fact.

·         I include my analysis of evidence (ie, review of sources) for each fact’s sources in that fact’s notes. This analysis is usually NOT copied to the person’s general notes.

·         I only enter a fact once. If some sources point to alternate information, I pick the best one, or a range, and I cite them all. 

I do use my database to create narrative reports for myself and to share with others. But I have found that most people I share with do not care about source citations. And the narrative reports give way too much information. So I guess I would have to admit that it is used mostly for me. I think most of the below posters have come to a similar conclusion. 

Another example of how I use my database to cite my sources and use the fact notes can be found in my “Am I an Evidence-Based Genealogist or Conclusion-Based Genealogist?” post.

Here's what other bloggers are saying:

Jasia’s My Love/Hate Relationship with Legacy Software at Creative Gene

Denise Levenick’s My Needs and Wants for Genealogy Database Software; How Well Does Family Tree Maker Mac2 Measure Up? at Family Curator

Shelley Bishop’s How I Use Reunion for Mac as my Genealogy Database at A Sense of Family

Randy Seaver's Ten Reasons Why I Use a Genealogy Software Program at Genea-Musings

Linda McCauley’s How I Use in My Genealogy Database at Documenting the Details

Am I an Evidence-Based Genealogist or Conclusion-Based Genealogist?

In his post “Are you an Evidence-Based or a Conclusion Based Researcher?” Randy Seaver brought up some interesting points about how we enter facts into our genealogy software and come to conclusions about what information from which sources for each fact is more true. He describes an “Evidence-based” user as one who enters information about a birth source, for example, from five different sources, as five different facts. This user then comes to a conclusion about which fact is most true and makes it a “preferred” fact in their software. The “Conclusion-based” user, on the other hand, evaluates all the evidence or sources and picks the best one, thereby reaching a conclusion as to which fact is most true. This user then creates one fact and cites one source (or multiple sources) for this one fact or conclusion.

I like to consider myself to be somewhat of a hybrid. Because I do sometimes like to use the report functions of my Rootsmagic software, I don’t like to enter more than one version of each fact. Having 5 instances of the Birth fact, for example, clogs up my narrative report and makes it difficult for me to read and understand. Instead I enter 1 fact and if there are differences within the evidence I’ve evaluated, I try to capture that within my fact description, citations, and notes.

For example, with the case of my brick wall, William Edward Peters, I have one Birth fact listed for him. I usually list the most specific information I have found, in this case, my birth fact says William was born 10 Mar 1874 in Thomasville, Oregon Co., MO.

For each piece of evidence I create a source citation and in the detail text field, I add the text that provides birth date and place information. In the screen shot below, the obituary from the Pocahontas Star Herald stated that William was born in Thomasville, MO on March 10, 1874.

Here is a table of information I collected about William’s birth. I used a total of six pieces of evidence or sources.

Birth Date	Mar 1877	1900 Census, Highland Twp., Oregon Co., MO
	Abt 1875	1910 Census, Big Apple Twp., Oregon Co., MO, taken April 28, 1910: lists his age as 35; 1910-35=b. 1875
	Abt 1872	1920 Census, Thayer Twp., Oregon Co., MO, taken Jan 6, 1920, lists his age as 48; 1920-48 = 1872
	Abt 1873	1930 Census, Bristow, Randolph Co., AR, taken Apr 15, 1930, lists his age as 57; 1930-57=1873
	Mar 10, 1874	Obituary Pocahontas Star, Feb 3, 1948
	Mar 10, 1874	Death Certificate, William E Peters, Feb 3, 1948
Birth Place	IL	1900 Census, Highland Twp., Oregon Co., MO
	IL	1910 Census, Big Apple Twp., Oregon Co., MO
	IL	1920 Census, Thayer Twp., Oregon Co., MO
	MO	1930 Census, Bristow, Randolph Co., AR
	Thomasville, MO	Obituary Pocahontas Star, Feb 3, 1948
	Thomasville, MO	Death Certificate, William E Peters, Feb 3, 1948

In the notes field for the Birth fact, I then analyze all pieces of evidence and state which pieces corroborate or contradict each other. I will usually indicate whether I think one piece weighs more than the other based on time it was created or from whom the information was provided.

Here are the notes I compiled about the six sources I analyzed about the birth of William Peters.

This is what my Rootsmagic narrative reports would look like if I had created a new birth fact for every piece of evidence I analyzed or encountered:

I really don’t like the way this example reads and says he “was born” six different times! Instead I prefer the more narrative approach with all of the facts listed within my source citations’ detailed text fields in the footnotes or endnotes of my report. A report with one fact listed and all six sources cited with the evidence analyzed and written up in the birth notes section looks like this:

Rootsmagic does have the capability of identifying one fact as the preferred or primary fact as Randy learned in his later post, however, in my Rootsmagic report, all six of the birth facts are still listed, even when one is identified as the primary fact.

So in conclusion, I consider myself to be an evidence-based genealogist, however:

·         I do NOT enter my evidence as separate facts.

·         I do, however enter them as separate sources under one umbrella fact.

·         In the example above, I used the most specific date and place.

·         However, if I had copied a specific date and place of birth for an ancestor from someone else’s family file off the internet, with no other corroborating evidence to support that information, I would probably not enter it as a fact in my database.

·         If I only have census reports as evidence and they say three different years of birth, I would simply state birth as between the lowest and highest year. In the case of my ancestor William Peters, discussed above, I would state “bet. 1872-1877” for date of birth.

·         Places of birth are trickier for me and I have not yet decided on a course of action. In the case of William Peters discussed above, I initially put “Missouri or Illinois” in the place of birth field. However that screws up my place list. So in that example, I might create two separate facts, one for Illinois and one for Missouri.

And why am I an Evidence-Based genealogist? Frankly because I love the records and what better way to show the love than to cite them and include them in all facts containing the information they reference?

So what are you? Do you evaluate and include every piece of evidence in your software and reports and analysis or do you determine your conclusion and use one piece of evidence to support that claim?

To Cite or Not to Cite? That's not really the question!

What if I WANT to cite my sources on my blog posts but I have no idea how?

I somehow missed all the hoopla about whether bloggers should cite their sources in their blog posts that was discussed on some mailing list that seemed to cause some huge divide between “certified” genealogists and non-certified genealogists. I read a few posts discussing the matter, which I won’t link to in an effort to “stop the insanity!” – as a side note, people have often told me that I looked like Susan Powter, who coined the above catchphrase, so I like to use it too and refer to it often.

Anyways, one theme I saw common to the posts that I read about was the issue with exactly how does one insert and format footnotes on a blog? Well, it’s pretty simple. I have done it several times and you are probably already doing it, but just don’t know it.

If you are like me, and you distrust the blogger platform to the point that you write all of your posts in a Word Processor prior to copying and pasting into a new Blogger post, then you can create your footnotes in your Word Processor. In Microsoft Word 2007, you can click on the “References” tab and then click the “Insert Footnote” button at the end of the sentence that you want to cite.

(Click on image to open a larger image. Then click your browser's back button to return to this page). 

Footnotes are usually inserted at the end of the sentence, outside of the period or quotation marks, without a space. When you insert a footnote, Word will then direct you to the bottom of the page where a number is inserted and the cursor is placed. This is where you will write in your citation. Or if you are not comfortable writing out a citation, you can write a note about the information you would like to cite. For example, if I found the will of Samuel Lewis, I might write the following note: “Will of Samuel Lewis, 1823, Randolph County, North Carolina; Found at the North Carolina State Archives.”  

So now you have your text and your footnote and it looks like this:

Now you are ready to copy and paste to a new blog post. Log in to Blogger, click on new post. Give your post a name. Then from your Word doc, press Ctrl + A to select all of your text. Do not worry about the text contained in the bottom of the page within the footnote itself. It will be captured with the Ctrl + A. Then press Ctrl + C to copy and then go to your new blog post window and click Ctrl + V to paste it in. This is what it will look like in your blogger edit window.

Blogger does retain the hyperlink between the footnotes, however, they do not work, so I would recommend that you remove them. If you click on the hyperlink, it will just open a blank page and your reader will get lost. To remove the hyperlinks, left-click your cursor on the [1] then click the “remove” link. Do this for the footnote [1] beneath the line as well.

Your new post will look like this: the [1] is regularly formatted text

Again, it doesn’t have to be perfect. If you want to put sources on your blog post, then this is an adequate and easy way to do it.

As a side note, I did try to create the footnotes and hyperlinks myself in Word, using the bookmark and hyperlink feature; and although the hyperlinks transferred over to blogger, they still did not work properly and opened a blank page when clicked. This would probably work if you created customized html code within your blog post editor, however, I did not see why that was necessary. The footnotes and citations are there for the reader to review if they want. The important part is making the citations available for my readers (or me) to review.

If you would like to share the way that you include footnotes in your blog posts, please feel free to leave a comment below or link to a post your wrote about how you post citations on your blog. And remember genealogy is a collaboration, not a conflagration of our peers~!

Follow-up Friday - Nov 3 2011

Last weekend I had a pretty good genealogy day over the weekend because I finally got my new desk set up. I heard that many of my genealogy pals got some good genealogy time put in over the weekend as well. I don't know if it's because the weather is getting cooler and we are staying inside more or if it's just because things are starting to slow down or what. But I definitely have a happy face on, despite the trials and tribulations I've been experiencing at work.

So in my genealogy news, I've been working on finding the parents of William Peters who was born in 1874 in Thomasville, Missouri. One of my DNA Family Finder matches believes the Peters line is our connection, however I don't have a leg to stand on because I can't get past William Peters. I did find a Martha Peters on the 1880 Oregon County, Missouri Census Report who could have been his mother as she had a young William living with her that fit my William. But then I got distracted by trying to trace this Martha to a James Peters family out of Anderson County, Tennessee. Turns out this family moved to Missouri and James disappeared leaving Martha to fend for herself and their 2 (or 3) children. Descendants of this family are not receptive to the idea of them having a son named William though, nor to the idea that Martha was living in Oregon County, Missouri in 1880! Another find I had is a newspaper article in which a John Peters was shot and beaten to death on his employer's farm by a gang of brothers in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I had heard my William was beaten to death but his death certificate said he died of a heart attack in Pocahontas, Arkansas. I wonder if maybe this John was William's father (or close relative) and he was the one the family remembers who was beaten to death. Only problem was that the 1880 Council Bluffs census says John Peters was single (William was born in 1874), he was living in Iowa and not in Missouri or Illinois where William was rumored to have been born, and John was from Denmark. Surely I would have heard something about Denmark in the family! Well the nice thing is that I've been able to comb through a bunch of newspapers that my University subscribes to.Click on this post to view newspaper article for the death of John Peters of Council Bluffs Iowa.

In addition to working on my Peters line, I have done some research on my Dunlap family in Stokes County, North Carolina.  Jesse Dunlap left North Carolina about 1820 and moved to Tennessee and then moved to Texas and then finally settled in Arkansas about 1840. His two sons, Jesse Dunlap, Jr and Lorenzo Dow Dunlap were killed in the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857 in Southern Utah. You might have heard about it. Click the above link for more information. Anyways, I started off my search in the totally wrong direction and it took a nice genealogist named Rex Bertram to set me straight. He sent me back to the North Carolina original records. So I have been combing through the Stokes County, North Carolina deeds (they are online – whoo hoo!), using the NorthCarolina State Archives online catalog called MARS to find land grants and wills, and compiling census records in order to piece together the history of the Dunlap family prior to their removal from North Carolina. This was also prompted by a Family Finder DNA match.

Lastly, I finished transcribing the estate files of John F. Dry of Perry County, Illinois. I happened upon these scans as I was making a list of files that I needed to scan during the next Scanfest. If you don’t know what this is, it happens the last Sunday of the month and it’s a time when genealogists all over the world get together in a chat room and chat while they scan their photos and documents. I usually do a pretty good job of keeping up with my scanning, but I always have a lot to catch up with after a trip to the library. These estate files were scanned once but at a very low resolution. I must have had a problem with the scanner. So they have not been transcribed. I did manage to rescan this set of estate files, so I was able to transcribe them. And then, my biggest feat of the week is that after reading Michael Hait’s blog post on Do you understand source citations? I decided to try my hand at writing an “official” citation to the estate file I was sent copies of and transcribed as mentioned above. It is probably missing several pieces because I was not the actual person who went to the courthouse and made the copies. In fact, I probably would have copied where the book sat on the shelf!

Anyways, here’s the citation I came up with (complete with footnote note):

John F. Dry Estate File No. 128, dated 1847; Perry County, Illinois Probate Records, Box 307; Perry County Courthouse, Pickneyville, Illinois. This estate file was copied by Stella Runyon, sarjas@hughes.net, Illinois, USA, in February of 2007 and sent to me by snailmail. Note that Stella told me this was file no. 158, however according to the Perry County Probate Index that is online at sarjas.com, and accessed 03 November 2011, (this is Stella’s homepage), it is file no. 128. I have change it to File No. 128 because I believe this index was compiled since 2007.

Check out Michael’s post if this citation doesn’t make sense to you!

Follow-up Friday Post – July 7, 2011

Death Certificates:

                In last week’s Follow-up Friday post, I mentioned that I ordered 5 death certificates from the State of Arkansas Department of Health Vital Records Section in Little Rock.  I received the first 2 of those death certificates in the mail this week. I scanned, transcribed them, and entered them into my notes and as new sources in my RootsMagic database.

                I received the death certificate of my 2^nd great-grandfather, William Edward Peters from Pocahontas, AR. He died in 1948. Unfortunately it did not list his parents’ names, however it did list his date of birth as March 10, 1874 and place of birth has Thomasville, Missouri. This information correlated with his obituary; however, most of his census records said he was born in Illinois. Click here to view his death certificate. 

                Follow up: I feel more comfortable going back and combing the census files again for Peters families in Thomasville (also Moore Township), Oregon County, Missouri now.

                I also received the death certificate of my 2^nd great-grandfather, James Franklin Lasiter from Fort Smith, AR. He died in 1968 at the age of 92. I found a photo in my grandmother’s collection of him and someone called “John Riley Lasiter,” presumably his father. The death certificate stated his father’s name was John R. Lasiter and his mother’s name was Emily Jones. His mother’s name was new information to me.

                Follow up: I can now start looking for records for Emily Jones Lasiter and John Riley Lasiter including census records, death records, and marriage records.

Richard Smith’s Confederate Service Records:

                As I also mentioned in last week’s Follow-up Friday post, I located the Confederate service records of my ancestor, Richard Smith.  I posted the muster roll cards to my Smith and Fox family Blog here. And I set some new goals and things to follow up on for next time, including to continue looking for his original enlistment muster roll and to see if I can find the Confederate records of Richard’s brothers John and Claiborn Smith who supposedly joined at the same time as Richard.

Fox Family:

                One of my Family Finder matches indicated that we might have a connection via the Fox family in Indiana. My Fox family is concentrated in Arkansas and Oklahoma, however, for some reason, my 3^rd Great-Grandfather, John A. Fox, moved to Indianapolis after his wife, Sophronia Maynard died in 1917. I guess his son Dillard Fox lived up there, so he went up there to be with him. Anyways, he was only there for 3 years before he died in Indianapolis. My grandfather had given me a copy of John’s death certificate, which is how we were able to locate him in Indiana.

So I went into my RootsMagic database and “touched” it up a bit by adding my sources and updating my notes in both John and his son Fred Fox’s files. Fred Fox was my 2^nd great-grandfather. I did things a little bit differently this time: I added the notes about each source to the individual notes section for each fact. Normally I just add everything to the main notes section under the name fact. I then added my commentary on the source.

I also updated my sources to Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained standards. Boy was that complicated! I encountered several problems with doing this, one of which was that Rootsmagic has several template options to choose from which may or may not follow EE.

As it turned out, my match mentioned Parke, Vigo, and Putnam counties, Indiana and I immediately knew right off the bat that it was NOT the Fox family that we connected on. This location would be my Godwin family that moved from North Carolina to Putnam County, Indiana in 1828. This is the first connection I’ve made with someone on my Mother’s side of the family!

Follow up: I am still waiting to hear back from him to see if he recognized any of the surname I sent to him.

Update ** October 5th, 2011 ** I have heard back from this Family Finder match and he said that he did not recognize any of the Godwin collateral line surnames that I sent to him from Parke, Vigo, Putnam and Clay Counties, Indiana, so we are back to square one! 

Web Search Feature of FTM 9.0

I learned that I could search records in ancestry.com from my Family Tree Maker software much faster than I could in Internet Explorer. Ancestry.com actually attaches a copy of the record directly to the person I queried. This has been a huge time saver for a few reasons:
(1) I don't have to worry about saving and finding a place to put the media files because FTM does that for me automatically
(2) I don't have to spend hours trying to figure out the best way to cite my source
(3) FTM automatically attaches it to relevant facts like name and residence (Census reports)
(4) If it is a later census report, it will also attach the source and media to all relevant people included in that record. For example, FTM would attach an 1860 census to the head of house, spouse and all children. It will even add that child to your tree for you if you elect to do so! There was a bit of a learning curve in trying to figure out how to add a census report for multiple people not in the same household, but I got it figured out and was on a roll all last night, well into the wee hours of the morning.