A portrait of the Raymond F. Dyer family (figure 1-8) contained notations on the back indicating the family's location in Brooklyn, New York, and the names of the family members. To organize what is known about a couple and their children, researchers usually use family group sheets (figure 1-9), which include spaces for names, parents, dates and places of events, children, spouses, sources, and other information to help identify members of a particular family. But the family group sheet note-keeping system goes a step further: it uses family group sheets to keep the actual notes. One family group sheet is used for each source entry. Thus, information about a man and his family described in a revolutionary war pension file would be copied onto family group sheets. The sources of the information must be included also for a complete and accurate record. Each additional source of information (census, deed, will, newspaper obituary, or other record) gets its own family group sheet, with only that file's information recorded. The same approach is used for every family shown on the pedigree chart.

This system makes it easier to compile summary family group sheets with everything known about the couple. After extensive research, all of the family group sheets for censuses, probates, deeds, Bibles, newspapers, printed biographies, and anything else used are combined and sorted into groups‹by head of household, for example. Bringing together all of the sheets for one name makes it easy to see if they seem to represent one person or more than one. This system also requires in-depth evaluation of each record as it is searched. The process of placing information into a set format is an analytical one. Clues for follow-up and discrepancies in dates, spellings, or places of origin, obvious during the extraction process, might be forgotten or overlooked later.