Divorce may have been forbidden in certain families and religious tradition, but that does not mean that married couples always got along or continued to live together. Your relatives may have never divorced, but instead may have lived separately based upon some legal arrangement. You may find a court case for separate maintenance or a land record separating their marital property. They technically aren’t divorced in those cases.
Have you tracked the ex-spouses of your ancestor or relative after the divorce? Sometimes it may not really “help” with your research directly, but there are times where it may directly benefit you on other family members. I realized that I have nothing in my files on my great-uncle’s wife after their early 1930s divorce. She and he had no children, so it’s not like this would help me trace down descendants, but it will complete my files and…one never knows what one will find until one looks.
Interviewing relatives should never be a “one time and you are done” thing, even if the person insists they cannot remember anything else. Use documents you have located to get the interviewee’s memory going. The name of an informant or a funeral home on a death certificate, the name of neighbor in a census, a street address of a home, and other details can easily jog someone’s memories.
I’ve always downloaded images to my own computer of records I’ve located online. I may not always be able to maintain the subscription to have online access to the image. The site you subscribe to may eventually lose the ability to host the image even if you don’t let your subscription expire. And there’s always the chance that you are unable to find the image again. If you’d like to help support Genealogy Tip of the Day, visit our “support us” page.
Errors are sometimes nothing more than accidents. This 1946 newspaper clipping incorrectly refers to Wilbur Johnson as William Johnson. Situations like this are why it is important to leave some search terms out when searching and search for all the names that may be in a record. And errors of this type are why if one record differs from every other record it could be a simple mistake.
We all have family skeletons and sometimes what we may think of as a minor indiscretion a relative may see as a major tragedy. Before you push too hard with questions or publicize a past incident too much, consider what sort of a response you might get from other family members. Some stories (particularly if you were personally involved in the event) may need to see the light of day, if only for our own healing and mental well-being. But if it happened in 1880 and could jeopardize your relationship with living family members, think twice. The decision is still yours, but just remember that one has to live with the living.
Scanning documents is great and an excellent way to preserve them. But transcribing serves a purpose too. It forces you to actually READ the document. That is a great way to notice phrases or words that sometimes get overlooked. And there are times when that one word or phrase can make all the difference. Transcribe something today.
Remember that just because your ancestor appears on a 1830 real property tax list for Coshocton County, Ohio, it doesn’t mean he lived there. Real property ownership in a location does not necessarily imply residence in that same location. People on personal property tax lists are more likely to have lived in the location. But as for the real property tax lists, your ancestor might have speculated on property, inherited it, acquired it through military service, etc. and never actually lived on it. Most property owners lived on or near the property, but don’t use your ancestor’s name on a real property tax list as your sole proof that he lived there.
There’s no bigger genealogy library than the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. Every year I take a group to the library–we have one presentation each day and the rest of each day is devoted to research. Our trip is from 31 May through 7 June 2017–we’re informal and focused on helping you with your research. There are additional details about our trip on our announcement page. Join Michael for a week of research in Salt Lake!
When viewing a book of mortgages, look on the edge of the document. Sometimes squeezed in, almost hidden by the binding, will be a signed note indicating the mortgage has been paid.
Don’t just blindly save images you find on the internet. Make certain to record some source information as well. The image used in this post is of a cemetery card that was located for a relative. There’s no notation anywhere on the card about the name of the cemetery or anything. I need that information. It should either be appended to the image of the card or included as a part of the file name–and for those who wonder, the cemetery is Holy Sepulchre Catholic Cemetery and Mausoleum in Alsip, Illinois.
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