Have you sketched out the migration of your ancestor on a map? To help sift out two men with a similar name, I put all their pre-1850 census enumerations on a map of New York, marking the locations. Sometimes a picture helps.
I was recently helping a friend with a genealogy problem and all our discussion appeared in a chat window in Facebook. I kept thinking to myself that I would have been less confused if I could have had the information in some sort of chart or chronology and another sheet with locations mapped out.
Unorganized text can make it difficult to notice things.
One response
I’m going to have to give this one a good try. There are several men in my family that bear the same name, some even born in the same year. I thought I’d found my fifth great-grandfather in Illinois, which made sense to me, since his only known son had migrated there from Tennessee. Only to find out, later, it was his first cousin. I’m not alone in this struggle. The authors of the published family history lamented not being able to ‘find’ him; not so much as even a Will. His date of death is uncertain. Pinning a map might help. His son ultimately died in Kansas, where my father’s family came from. Dad was born there, too. Might have a look at those census records, too. We got to that region, somehow. The family started in the Great Colony of Virginia. My branched dropped down to the Watauga Settlements (which ultimately became East Tennessee) and then we spread further West. Another branch went down to Texas. He’s got to be somewhere. Thanks for this. 🙂