Any reference to a relationship between two people may not be as specific as you would like. A letter may indicate two women are sisters, but are they biological sisters sharing two parents or are they: half-sisters–sharing one biological parent? step-sisters–sharing no biological parent? sisters-in-law? sisters in the church? Always keep yourself open to the possibility that a stated relationship may not be quite as precise as you would like. Usually a “sister” is a full sister, sharing both parents-but there are times it is not. This is why it is always recommended to obtain as many records as possible that may state the relationship between two people as just one record may not quite shed full light on the connection.
My daughter’s dog is named Riley. My great-great-grandfather is as well. Just because the name is the same does not mean they are identical. While there are many things that can be used to distinguish one person from another, key elements are: age place of birth occupation social class spouse children residence etc. Try and glean all the clues from each record to see what elements about this record suggest other identifying pieces of information about the people it mentions.
Church records are usually private records. When they are private records, the general public does not have a right to view them. It does not matter how long your relative attended the church, how devout they were, etc. Private records are not subject to public access laws. Many churches do allow individuals to view their records or will graciously allow them to be looked at, transcribed, etc. But they do not have to.
There is still time to join us for our webinar on “Preparing for Your DNA Test Results” on 4 February. Details are on our site.
Individuals can be mentioned in a newspaper long after they are dead, but usually not before they were alive. Newspaper references to Ida Sargent run from 1891 through 1994. The sixteen year old is mentioned when visiting the town of Tioga, Hancock County, Illinois, in 1891 and is mentioned in her daughter’s obituary in 1994, fifty-five years after her own death. Don’t stop looking in newspapers for someone when they die.
It does not matter how long you’ve been researching a family–new variant spellings can always pop up. Most immigrants from my Trautvetter family were 19th century immigrants to the central United States (Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri) and used mainly a handful of similar spellings (Trautvetter, Trautfetter, Troutvetter, and Troutfetter). Their name would occasionally get spelled incorrectly in a record here or there, but the members of the family used a name that sounded like “Trautfetter.” There was always a “Tr,” some vowels, a “t,” a “v” or an “f” and then “etter.” Except for a new guy I discovered. An earlier immigrant from this family settled in Massachusetts in the 1760s and used the name Trofatter after his 1767 marriage. It gets spelled several different ways–all of which […]
Due to the passage of time, some original records are difficult to read. Writing fades, pages get torn, mice chew on paper, etc. There may have been entries that the indexer or transcriber could only partially read. How are those entries put in the database? Where are they put in a published book? You need to know–because there’s always a chance that partial entry is for your person.
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A bequest is a gift of personal property in a will. A devise is a gift of real property in a will. Bequests and devises in wills can be made to heirs or to someone who is not an heir. An heir is someone who has statutory rights to inherit from the estate of a deceased person.
A DNA test for genealogical purposes can result in one or more surprises. Sometimes those surprises impact more than the tester–they can impact other living family members as well. Not all surprises are about relatives who have been dead for a hundred years. You could discover that a parent or grandparent had a relationship (and a resulting child) with someone you do not know. Non-genealogists in your family may be impacted by this discovery. A “surprise” cousin could result in a similar fashion if an aunt or uncle had a child that no one knows about. Other living family members may not even know about that child. It is very possible the father may not even know the child exists. Many people find no modern “surprises” in their […]
Do you regularly look for people in their parents’ hometown newspapers? They may never have lived in the area at all, but may appear in “hometown” newspapers as visiting relatives. Great way to discover connections.
An obituary indicated that a pallbearer for a relative was Earl Trautvetter. The other pallbearers were individuals whose names I recognized as being nephews or nephews-in-law of the deceased. Then it dawned on me–the obituary was likely referring to my uncle that I always knew as “Babe.” His real name, which I knew but occasionally put in the back of my mind, was actually Carl. Earl was likely the result of someone misreading the initial “C” in his first name as an “E” or some other sort of typographical error. An additional difficulty with this error was that the incorrect name was one that I heard differently. It didn’t sound like Carl and so it took me a little bit longer to realize what had likely happened. Sometimes […]
4 February 2018—8 PM Central This hour-long presentation will present a brief overview of what autosomal DNA results are and are not. These are the tests that are done at AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA, and 23andMe. Effective use of your results is easiest to do if pre-planning is done beforehand. This presentation will also help those who have not really delved into their results or feel they need to regroup their analytical process. Discussion will include determining what problems your results can potentially answer, goal-setting, preparing for sifting through your results, generalized sifting strategies, locating as many ancestral descendants as possible, reasons why you have to work on the people who aren’t your problem people, and more as time allows. Order now for immediate download.
Researchers come at items in newspapers from a variety of ways: manual searches, digital images with indexes that indicate the page, digital searches that target the specific item, etc. No matter how you get to it, make certain you read the entire page the item is located in–particularly obituaries. This 1940-era obituary listed out of town relatives, but did not specify the relationship. In a separate item in the local “gossip” section, they were again named–along with their relationship to the person whose funeral they were attending. It may seem like in this case it would be “obvious” to find them, but sometimes when images come to our computer screen zoomed in from search results, it can be easy to not look at anything else. That’s a mistake. […]
I’m not certain if it was a play on words, an attempt at humor, or exactly what, but one of my great-grandfathers referred to the town of Elvaston, Illinois, as “hell fenced in.” It’s not a very big place, and I doubt if it was ever a really wild place, but I’ve made a note of it in my files. It’s never a bad thing to record things you know about your relative’s sense of humor–even if you don’t get the joke. And…the phrase may have simply resulted from the way “Elvaston” could have been pronounced by some people.
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