If your relative was a mover from point A to point B, have you looked to see if there were any individuals who also moved from point A to point B? That person could have moved before your relative, at the same time as your relative, or after your relative. That person may have been related to your ancestor by biology, by marriage, or geographic proximity.
Sometimes it can be difficult to see who these other movers were. Some ways to look for them include:
- Looking in county histories to see if there are biographees born in the same town/village or county as your ancestor.
- Searching online images of newspapers for obituaries of people who list a place of birth that’s the same as your ancestor (search for “born” and “same county as ancestor” within close proximity to each other to try and find these obituaries).
- If your relative got a military pension, see who provides testimony and how long they’ve known your ancestor.
- Who interacted with your ancestor in the first few years your relative was in a new area?
- Does your ancestor have neighbors from the same state that he or she is from?
- Etc.
Figuring out some of those people may help you on your ancestor.
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2 Responses
Great list for finding those FAN club members who migrated with you. My problem is I don’t know where they came from, so I end up looking at everyone around my guy hoping to find a clue (this is pre-1850, by the way).
That’s the problem with that time period. One of my German families landed in Cincinnati, Ohio, only to move west to rural Illinois a few years later. My gut tells me that the connection to rural Illinois was a neighbor or something of that type and left no “record” of their relationship.