Here’s a brief example of how I work:
I begin by registering each source in Zotero — regardless of type — entering all relevant metadata and establishing the appropriate folder structure both in Zotero and in my Obsidian Vault. This ensures consistency and traceability from the very start.
For instance, historical newspapers — such as weekly listings of positional data for over 2,000 Norwegian mercantile ships between 1920 and 1940. I know several of my relatives sailed on multiple of these vessels.
I convert the listings into a CSV file and import it into Obsidian as MD-tables, enriched with wiki-links for each ship, captain, date, departure and arrival port, and other relevant metadata.
Each newspaper source is also linked back into Obsidian using citation plugins, ensuring source integrity and bidirectional traceability.
If I find a ship’s manifest — say, from FamilySearch or digitized US archives — I extract the full crew list into another CSV and Markdown table, again with wiki-links for each sailor. These manifests often include ship names, dates, and other contextual data that help track individual movements. This is crucial, because sailors frequently “jumped ship” — so knowing when someone signed on with a new vessel or went ashore in a foreign port is key to reconstructing their trajectory.
Sometimes I come across a letter or postcard from one of these sailors, mentioning that they were in a specific port at a specific time. I register that item in Zotero as a source, create a note in Obsidian, link it via the Zotero plugin, and add wiki-links for all relevant data — such as place, time, and ship name if mentioned.
As these data points accumulate, I begin to see network graphs emerge — showing connections not only between events and locations, but also between individuals. Many of these people aren’t direct relatives, but they often sailed together, went ashore together, and signed on with new ships together. In several cases, I’ve located missing family members by tracing their shipmates instead.
I also include census data for entire households and addresses. More than once, I’ve discovered that a neighbor was actually a not-so-distant relative — cousins or extended family living in the same building, sometimes even in the same household, but listed as tenants or domestic staff. Norwegian census records often include information about previous residences, which adds another layer of traceability.
All of this goes into Zotero as sources and is linked back to my Markdown notes in the Vault.
I maintain Markdown notes not only for people and sources, but also for events, places, objects, and more — all organized in a folder hierarchy (see attached example). This structure is mirrored in Zotero and in any other software I use that supports it.
Across Gramps and all other programs I use, I link the relevant Markdown notes to each research object or subject wherever possible — including Aeon Timeline, Cytoscape, Gephi, and others. I only do this for long-term research projects; for quick checks or exploratory work, I usually just enter the core data for fast overview.
I don’t enter events or other data into Gramps until I’ve reached a certain level of confidence and source validation. If I encounter objects that consistently contradict earlier findings or prove irrelevant, I still include them in Gramps — so that anyone continuing the work later won’t repeat the same loops I’ve already gone through.
This is also why I’ve moved most of my research into Markdown and Foam/Obsidian — it’s much easier to visualize what’s confirmed, refuted, or still pending. A simple tag or folder structure can show the status at a glance. I mirror this in Zotero using both Collections and Tags.
Obsidian also has powerful plugins that allow me to publish notes and graphs online as pure HTML and JS. There are longform writing plugins, diagram and graph plugins, and several timeline plugins for basic chronological views. But for advanced timeline research, I use Aeon — because when dealing with thousands of events and relationships, a visual timeline is far easier to read than a table.
All of these notes are linked to the respective Gramps objects — including sources, places, events, and more.
I add a little part of my Obsidian Vault as a Print Screen, as well as a print screen of a fraction of a new “template structure” for Zotero that I am trying to create, just to give some idea on how it looks.
—
***PS. this is the short version.
Note: This text was translated from Norwegian and formatted for English flow by Copilot.***
And this is a view of the Network Graph for one of my relatives (one of the sailors)… focused on Newspapers (green) and other ships lists (blue), ports (red) and humans (light blue and pink)
