For years, the local plat book showing where landowners properties were located in the county where I am from contained at least one error of which I was aware. I was aware because I heard it from my parents. The creator of the plat book had switched the locations of two properties: some pasture ground my parents owned and a local subdivision. The error remained in the plat book for nearly thirty years. Did it really matter? No. The local plat book was not an official record and most relatively modern plat books showing locations of real property and their owners include caveats regarding the potential for errors in their publications. Even if the maps were created from official records, these privately published plat books are not legal […]
It does not matter whether you are a professional genealogist, an occasional “hobbyist” researcher, or somewhere in between: Your ancestors’ stories deserve to be told as accurately as possible. It does not matter how fast you research them. It does not matter how much information you discover or collect. It does not matter how long it take to obtain information, sort it out, and compile it. What does matter is working to collect information that reflects their life and their story as accurately as you can. That means not just copying information from other trees or sites without analyzing it and thinking about it. That means not sharing or disseminating information that is mere speculation without some sort of source or documentation to back it up. It also […]
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If a document refers to your ancestor as the lessor on lease–he owns the property that is the subject of the lease. If your ancestor is referred to as the lessee, he is the person being given temporary use of the property. The lessor owns it, the lessee borrows it–generally speaking. Leases are not often recorded. If there was a disagreement about the interpretation of the lease or if the lessor or lessee refused to live up to their obligations under the lease, a court action may have been the result. In that case the lease may be contained in the court records.
A reminder from a few years back: Putting a clause in your will that “my genealogical papers are to go to the BlahBlah Library” without some advance planning could have unintended consequences. Some thoughts on preserving your “files” and papers by donating to a library or archives: libraries may not want or be able to maintain random copies of public records that are available elsewhere libraries may not want or be able to maintain random copies made from published books unorganized materials are difficult for libraries to inventory and manage and they are difficult for patrons to use photographs, personal certificates, and other “unique” items are more likely to be preserved and collected, but it can be difficult for some facilities to afford to maintain these collections–consider leaving […]
When someone does not come up in an index, here are some things to think about: have you considered all alternate spellings? have you double checked what you put in the search boxes (right names in right boxes, no boxes with information from “old searches,” etc.)? could the person be in the record under a different last name (step-father, new husband, etc.)? have you used wildcards to expand your searches? do you know the index is complete or is it in “process?” are you certain the person really should be in the record? do you know how the original records were organized and preserved? have you performed a manual search of the records? have you asked someone else for a suggestion?
Do not rely only on keyword searches to find items in digital images of newspapers. Some digital images can be difficult for the optical character recognition software to interpret correctly. The 1888 obituary in this death notice was located by a manual search based upon the known death date. Take a manual look at the newspapers being searched by your keyword searches. The original images may make it easier to see why some things cannot be found with the index.
Residential or business directories may contain sub-directories of specific occupations after the “main directory.” These directories may contain additional clues about your ancestor. Don’t just find your ancestor once and quit. There may be smaller directories in the back. The illustration shows a list of Silver-Laced Wyan-Dotte chicken breeders in Hancock County, Illinois, in 1918. Look in the back. Don’t be chicken <grin>.
There’s a published “marriage book” for a county where I have quite a few ancestors. The book was made by using the local marriage records contained in the county records office. The book indexes the names of the bride and the groom. Other names are not included. The original records from which the published marriage book was compiled are online. FamilySearch and Ancestry have indexed the records as well. Do I need to view the book and look for my relatives for whom I have already searched in the actual records and in the indexes at FamilySearch and Ancestry? Probably not to be perfectly honest–but there is a caveat. What I should do is track for whom I have searched the originals and the online indexes. I should […]
I have copies of my parents’ high school yearbooks, so accessing them digitally online is not a necessity. Recently, partially out of boredom, I decided to look at Ancestry’s digital images of the yearbooks I already have paper copies of. There were a few notations as to the married names of some of the female graduates. Is there a chance that the digital copy of a the same book you have has annotations, comments, or even signatures that your copy does not? Year books are probably the best example where the copy that was used to make a digital image may contain personalizations that are in no other copy, but genealogies and other books can have remarks and other commentary added as well.
Many Southern US states required marriage bonds into the 19th century. These bonds were not paid in order for the couple to get married. They represented a potential fine or penalty if after the couple married it was determined that one of them had a legal impediment to marriage. That’s what the stated value of the bond represented. The individuals who signed as bondsmen were generally “worth” at least that amount in real and personal property and knew that the couple had no legal reasons why they could not marry. Or at least thought they were certain there was no reason the couple could not marry <grin!>.
If Uncle Herman (or Aunt Hermina) disappears after they reach young adulthood, consider the fact that they might not really have disappeared? In some families if a child was “not right,” they might have been institutionalized and never mentioned again.
Just because your ancestor uses the phrase “my now wife” in his will, it does not mean he had to have been married twice. A man might use the phrase to make it clear to whom a bequest was being made. If his will said “to my now wife I leave my farm for her life and if she is deceased it is to go to my children” that meant his wife at the time he wrote his will. He might have been concerned that if he remarried and his “then wife” married again that his real property might fall out of his family’s hands.
What is the biggest mistake you can make when going back to work on an ancestor you have not researched in years? Not reviewing what you actually know about that ancestor. Sometimes our memory of an ancestor is not correct and researching based on incorrect facts can lead to more confusion. Review what you actually know about an ancestor before you start seeing if you can locate new information about them.
Sometimes researchers wonder why they should get something when “it’s only going to tell me what I already know.” That’s a valid concern, but there are times when that record that “repeats” what other records say can be helpful, such as: the first record has a questionable informant the first record really doesn’t make sense the first record is difficult to read the first record is one that may be inaccurate And there is always the chance that the “record that tells what you already know” has information that you’ve not located elsewhere. You don’t know until you look.
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