For your brick wall ancestor, can you name at least five people who are in his group of associates, neighbors, and friends who are not related by blood or marriage to your ancestor?
Might be a good exercise. You don’t have to name them here.
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2 Responses
Michael, This does sound like an interesting exercise, but in my case & I assume those of many other researchers, our main brick walls are WONEN, not men. I have referred to mine as “loose women” for decades, but interestingly, I along with other people researching these families have never been able to find anything earlier than marriage records for these women, 2 great-great grandmothers & a 3x great grandmother. In at least 2 cases, they reported moving great distances from where they were born by the time they were married, & one scholar at the Family History Library told me he believed that at least one of these women had no idea where she had been born. All of her children continued to give their mother’s birthplace as the state she claimed. In my family, a number of men were married many miles from where they were born, & no one has ever questioned their memory. It seems that most women at least prior to the mid-twentieth century concentrated only on marriage & their families. Of course not having running water & electricity in places where my families lived made life exceptionally difficult for these women. I doubt if few of them had opportunity to be acquainted with men outside of their families except for a minister or perhaps a doctor, so I’d like to know if your associates’ list would work for them. Any ideas?
The use of “he” here was in a somewhat generic sense and I should have made it all-inclusive because, as you indicate, most of our brick walls in terms of parentages involve women. Most of the time this is because women are generally in fewer records for reasons of which I’m certain you’re well aware.
One approach is to look closely at the men they married and see what clues there are and what men those men interact with–are they possible connected somehow to the wife, her family, or in some way to where she was from or the family from which she was from? For women during this time period, it unfortunately will be about the husband and his records…and looking at all them and seeing who is interacting with them on these documents and tracking those individuals further back.
Are their neighboring families with a husband or wife from the same area as the birck wall wife (assuming the state isn’t one nearby where there are likely to be more neighbors from).
And sometimes it still doesn’t work. My female Irish immigrant has been a brick wall for decades and I had hoped that a member of her family had settled in the rural area where she and her husband did. Turned out the immigrant migration connection was through the husband’s family.