Years ago I was stuck on my Ira Sargent. I spent a fair amount of time locating men with this name in the 1860 and 1870 census in an attempt to show they were “my guy” who first appeared in the 1880 census. For one reason or another I was able to eliminate them as being mine. The one thing I did was keep a list of every one I found along with the reason why he was not mine. The reasons varied, but included: too old, too young, born in wrong place, wrong wife, etc. Keeping track of the reasons was important for two reasons. One was so that I didn’t redo the research. The second was that I could go back and revisit these “wrong” guys […]
It is important somewhere to keep track of your research logic as you progress. Otherwise you might not remember “why” you are researching a certain person. Several years ago, I focused on a certain Benjamin Butler in the 1850 census as being “mine.” Using that enumeration as the starting point, I searched other records and made research progress–on the apparent family listed in that enumeration. A stack of papers and records. One problem–I didn’t track WHY I thought this 1850 census entry was for the my Benjamin. It took me hours to reconstruct my reason–time wasted. When I decided the 1850 guy was “mine,” I should have written down my reasons. That would have saved time later and made it easier to review my reasons should that have […]
Some documents clearly state who was the informant. Many though do not provide this information. When considering the accuracy of information on any document, consider the probable informant and how likely they were to know the information being provided.
Your relative may know more about deceased family members than they are willing to tell you. And they may never tell you everything you know, no matter how much you wish they would or how many times you ask. For reasons that are entirely too long for a “short tip,” I know my own grandmother knew more about her grandfather than she ever told me, including the fact that he had a second wife. Yet my queries about him always received a “don’t know anything response.” Sometimes that is all you are going to get and sometimes you have to let it go to preserve relationships with your living relatives.
Photos of babies can be some of the most difficult images to identify. Parents with multiple children can sometimes have difficulty telling which picture is which child. When decades have passed and the child in the photograph is likely deceased, identification can be more difficult. In some individuals facial features change from infancy to adulthood and someone who only knew the person as a grownup may have no idea what that person looked like as an infant. Ways to help identify such photographs include: Retaining any organizational structure of pictures. If the photographs are grouped, take group pictures of the photographs as a way of preserving the organizational structure. Organizational structure includes: albums, envelopes, boxes, etc. Albums are not the only way photographs can be organized. Any organizational […]
When you have a new county that is a part of your genealogical research, make certain you know the county seat, when different types of records begin and where they were created, where the county lines are now and where they were when your people lived there, and information on local repositories. These pieces of information are just to get you started finding the information you need to know. There is more than this that will be helpful with your research, but these facts are an absolute must. These websites will get you started: The USGenWeb page for the county– some of these are not updated frequently. The FamilySearch Wiki page for the county–some of these are incomplete and not always entirely accurate County Historical/Genealogical society webpages–do a […]
Some researchers will “believe” something when they have three sources that provide the same piece of information. One has to be careful using this approach. Sources may all contain information from the same person or “original source,” which does not really mean that three “sources” agree. It could only mean that the same person gave the information three times. And there is always the chance that the second two “sources” got their information from the first. Think about who provided the information, why it is in the record, and how reasonably the informant would have known the information. That’s a good way to get started with information analysis.
In December of 1905, my great-grandparents mortgaged a 1/10 interest in a piece of property, signing a five-year note. They paid it off in June of 1907. They may have paid it off early to save on the interest or they may have paid it off because in the summer of 1907 their mother wanted to sell the property and could not sell it with the mortgage unpaid. Sometimes there’s a reason why things happen when they do.
Many men who served in the union Army in the United States Civil War did not enlist in the state where they resided. For a variety of reasons a man may have enlisted in a unit from a neighboring state. Usually it was to help the state where he enlisted meet it’s quota. But don’t dismiss a potential reference to your soldier ancestor simply because he’s from the “wrong” state.
Whenever using an index or finding aid to any other series of records, ask yourself how the index or finding aid actually works. Does it index every name included in the record? Or does it just index the names of the primary individual (the deceased on a death certificate, the child on a birth certificate, the pensioner in a pension record, etc.)? What other names are typically included in an individual’s record? If you cannot answer these questions, you might not be using the index or finding aid effectively.
Is it possible that your relative was married one more time than you think? I was working on a family for a friend and initial difficulties finding the marriage of the known couple were because the female had been married before to a man who died approximately three months after their marriage. The marriage of the known couple actually lasted only about a year and a half when the wife died the day after giving birth to their child. Sometimes those short marriages can be easy to overlook, but they can generate just as much genealogical information as marriages that lasted decades–even if they don’t result in children.
We are offering a small group trip to the Allen County Public Library’s Genealogy Collection in August of 2021. The library is located in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and houses one of the nation’s largest genealogical collection. Registration is limited. The trip will follow the library’s protocols for health and safety. The trip will be the first week of August 2021. Additional details are on our announcement page.
When a name gets passed down, people often think it’s from someone in the same generation as the parents or grandparents of the person who has the family name. That name can easily come from a generation or two further back. A parent could easily have chosen a name of one of their grandparents to give their child or from a beloved aunt or uncle who was actually one of their grandparents’ siblings. That family name may come from a little further back than you think. And don’t just assume that the first person you find with the same name in the tree is where the person got the name from. There may be another person you haven’t found yet who is the reason the name was passed […]
Your relative may have used their initials instead of their full name because they didn’t like their actual name, wanted to distinguish themselves from another relative of the same name, or possibly some other reason. This 1950-era picture of my Grandpa Neill’s pickup and my Dad indicate that Grandpa had “C. R. Neill” as his name on the truck. That could have been simply because it was cheaper to have painted or took less room. I have seen a few other references to him by his initials, but there are also numerous references to him that include his first name of Cecil as well.
Transcriptions of actual documents may contain marks that appear to be errant strays left by a careless clerk. Occasionally that it exactly what they are. Other times they are not. Clerks who made handwritten copies of records that served as an official copy may have noticed spelling errors, errors of fact, or other inconsistencies in the original document. It was not the clerk’s job to correct. Instead when a clerk noticed an inconsistency in an original record and was making a handwritten copy, they would often make an annotation as is done in the 1862 marriage record from Missouri used in the illustration. The clerk noticed that Kempster was spelled two different ways in the record and the Kempter was used once. When it was spelled “Kempter” on […]
Recent Comments