You’ve located a document on an ancestor that provides bits and pieces of information about their entire life–say a death certificate. It can be tempting to move to working on the most “exciting” bits of data in that death certificate–the parents, the place of birth, and the like. But the best thing to do from a research standpoint is to search for materials created closest in time to the document you just found. For a death certificate, that may mean an obituary, a probate, the last census they are enumerated in, late-in-life land transfers, etc. Those documents may confirm or deny part of what’s in the death certificate or give you additional information to search earlier records more effectively.
Ask yourself “what other records could there be created close in time to the one I just found?”
It is analogous to saying that when researching immigrants, do all the work in the country where they settled before trying to “cross the pond.”
No responses yet