subject: It's a Mistake to Rely on One Ancestor Search Site [print this page] It's a Mistake to Rely on One Ancestor Search Site
Have you made this mistake in your ancestor 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 family stories, but then stop, think, and try to corroborate them with hard evidence to confirm what you have been told.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.Back to my problem...the research I was doing had been initiated by reading some "thoughts" put down on paper by one of my relatives before he died. I had been shown this family history because I shared an ancestor in common with my cousins and I wanted to enter this particular forebear into my family tree as well.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!In the end I decided to look to see what the other websites offering BMD details had in their databases. What a fool I felt as there was my ancestor, on this other site, with his name spelt correctly, death registered in the correct district, but aged 70 and not 66 years at the time. The year of his death was 1935 and not 1930 and I kicked myself for not looking at the alternative look up site earlier and for being blind to the dates.The lessons for me to relearn and hopefully for you to benefit from are as follows:Remember that all websites are fallible and omissions happen, as in this 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 do hope that when you approach your own family history research that you don't make this mistake and will heed my advice: Use more than the one look-up site in your family tree research.
