Use More Than One Genealogical Site
Here is a common mistake made in family history research.
There are times when I find myself talking to someone new to family history, about brick walls in doing ancestor research. I often find myself going back to the advice, that I have been given by the professional genealogists when I set out, to use more than just one website to do lookups and to beware of family stories. Now I don't consider myself to be anything near a Genealogical Guru, I am simply someone who has gained a bit of experience over the years and now, for what it is worth, I am happy to pass on some of my tips here. The two here are about stepping back from the research results and introducing some careful thought into the proceedings.
> Think logically about a person's time-line.
> Listen to those stories that have circulated in your family for years, note them down and then stop. Can you corroborate them from primary data sources to prove that they are indeed correct?
An ancestor's date of birth is obviously going to dictate to you an approximate time for when they could have got married or when you should reasonably expect them to have died. So a little thought should make alarm bells ring if a forebear seems to be getting married in their hundredth year. Its possible but rare!
Similarly, what are the chances that they will be marrying at the tender age of 6 or 7? So, my advice is to beware of entries on ancestor look-up sites that are for people who just happen to have the same name as your ancestor, but are just plain and simply the wrong people. Another thing to look out for is family lore that speaks of when the family believe an ancestor died.
One weekend, when doing some family tree research, I got myself stuck in a hole and wasted oh so much time digging it deeper and deeper. What was it I was doing wrong and how did I finally get out of it? Well I was trying to find the details of when an ancestor died so that I could purchase a death certificate from the General Register Office site.
Ancestry.co.uk is one of my foremost research sites. I like its content and I have become used to the way it works. But I do not use it exclusively, oh no. I have subscriptions to one or two others such as TheGenealogist.co.uk, which I find excellent and I also have a great deal of respect for the accuracy of the FindMyPast.com website.
Returning to the problem that I was looking into. I had seen some family history notes written down by a member of my family before he had died. My cousins had shown me this as we all shared a common ancestor in our great grandfather.
The handwritten notes indicated that our ancestor had died aged 66. From this I thought I was correct in working out that, as the person was born in 1865, that they probably died in 1930. I went on to Ancestry.co.uk and searched by name for the ancestor in all four quarters of 1930, but to no avail. I then broadened my research for ten years either side and spent hours looking for them without any luck. I then thought I'd try misspellings of the ancestor's name as this, I thought, is surely why they are missing. Result: A big fat nothing!
Eventually, after much wasted time, I thought about using one of the other websites that offers Birth marriage and death details, something I really should have done early on if I had listened to what I'd been taught. And what did I find? There he was, on the other BMD site spelt correctly and dying in the district where I expected him too, but aged 70 not 66 and in the year 1935 not 1930!
The lessons for me to relearn and hopefully for you to benefit from are as follows:
Please bear in mind that all websites are fallible and that information can be omitted, as it was in this particular case.
Family stories can sometimes be wrong as humans are not blessed with 100 percent recall and we can get things wrong, as it would seem this relative did in his writings for his children!
I hope that you won't make this mistake in your ancestor research and will use more than the one look-up site in your family tree search.
by: Nick Thorne
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