Some family traditions are more true than others. The problem is proving them. My usual approach for dealing with family traditions is to break them into the things that (if true) might have created a record or document and those things that probably did not leave any record.Then I focus on trying to prove or disprove the parts of the story that I can. Often the family tradition is mostly false, but sometimes there is a grain of truth in there somewhere. I find that breaking it up into “possibly provable” and “probably not provable” a good way to start working on the tradition. There is an old article on the Ancestry.com site I wrote on this topic. ———————————— Check out GenealogyBank’s Offer for Tip of the Day […]
I am a big believer in studying migration chains. Your ancestor did not just arbitrarily move from point A to point B. Chances are someone encouraged him to move, or sent him a letter telling him how good it was in the new area, etc. Even if there was not someone from “home” living in his new destination when he arrived, chances are someone from “home” came out to settle where he did after he was there. My wife and I have over twenty ancestral families who came from Europe in the mid-19th century. All of them (save one) came where they knew someone or else had someone come over from Europe after they did. And even those families moving across the US moved as part of a […]
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