Family Tree Research - Don't Make These 2 Mistakes
You wouldn't expect Family History 'Professionals' to ever make mistakes when they are constructing their own Family Trees
, would you? Well...hardly ever! Well...I've made quite a lot of mistakes actually, so you needn't feel embarrassed about your own!! And anyway, making mistakes in Genealogy is natural and, as in any other area of your life, you become a Family History 'expert' when you make mistakes and learn from them.
Again, as in life, you make most of your Family Tree mistakes when you're just starting out. Luckily, Family History is a forgiving occupation - you can't sack yourself just because you've made an error of two! And so, to the nub of this article - the first reason you make mistakes at first in your Family History is because you rush into things and try to take shortcuts, the second reason is you try to do too much all at once and don't focus.
I'll show you what I mean. When I started compiling my own Family Tree, I didn't concentrate on just one family line. I began to build up the genealogy of my mum and dads' family trees all at the same time - it was all so new and exciting - all those people I'd never heard of were my ancestors, and I was keen to learn as much as I could about them as quickly as possible. And because I was distracted, I didn't take as much care as I should have.
Now, the only thing my dad had told me about his family was that his 'paternal' grandmother was named Brown and came from Dorset. So, I began looking for a Flint-Brown marriage on www.FreeBMD.org.uk - and I found that the wedding was in 1892 in Islington, North London; from the marriage certificate, I discovered that my grandmother's full name was Elizabeth Delilah Brown, she was born around 1868 in Milbourne. The discovery that 'Delilah' was her middle name was a real bonus, because I had originally despaired of finding a plain 'Elizabeth Brown' because it was such a common name. Also, I reasoned, being named 'Delilah' might mean that her relations also had 'biblical' names.
So I took out a trial subscription to www.Ancestry.co.uk, and immediately found an Elizabeth Brown in Beaminster born in 1868 - I immediately went onto the Mormon www.FamilySearch.com site and found that there were lots of Browns in Beaminster with names like Solomon (Elizabeth's father), Abraham, and Melsheck. What a result, I thought, I'd found the right Elizabeth Brown straight away! I looked on the map and found Beaminster, but I couldn't find Milbourne anywhere near it - so I just assumed it was a small suburb or hamlet nearby. On the Marriage Certificate, her father's name was Samuel - and again I assumed that the North London Registrar had misheard her say Solomon! I just didn't have the time to check it all out because I was also trying to trace all the other branches of my Family Tree at the same time, before my Ancestry trial period expired.
I spent the next few years carefully compiling the Family Tree of the Beaminster Browns - from Birth, Marriage and Death certificates, Censuses and Parish Registers. There was, however, one thing that bothered me - how did my great-grandfather and Elizabeth ever meet. In the 1891 Census she was a 'school caretaker' in Beaminster, while Arthur had just returned from 8 years in India and was living in Islington - and yet they were married the next year! In those days, it's not as if Elizabeth caught a Saturday train to London and met Arthur in a West End 'disco' or night-club!
But then someone posted a record of Elizabeth's younger sister on GenesReunited - it seems that she had married and was living in Marylebone in 1891 which was just next door to Islington. So, obviously, I thought, Elizabeth had gone to stay with her and met Arthur that way.
I pulled my great-grandparent's marriage certificate out of my files to see if Elizabeth's address in 1892 was the same as her sister's - it wasn't, and then I noticed that Elizabeth Delilah's occupation was noted as a being a 'domestic servant', not a 'school caretaker'. I also noted, more strongly this time, that she was born in Milbourne and her fathers' name was Samuel. I took the road map out again, and looked for Milbourne - and found it some 80 miles away on the other side of Dorset. And, searching Ancestry again, I found another Elizabeth Brown in the 1871 Census, born in 1868 in Milbourne, whose father's name was Samuel and whose mother's name was Delilah - and this Elizabeth had moved to Islington by 1891 to work as a domestic servant!
I realised that I had spent some 4 years researching the wrong Elizabeth Brown! And all because, at first, I didn't take a few minutes to check a map thoroughly, and search on the Censuses for an Elizabeth Brown with a father named Samuel!!
by: Martin Flint
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