Ancestry Quest: How stories from the past can heal the future

• Do keep track of your sources—one day you’ll wonder how you know your third great-grandmother’s baptismal date, but you won’t know how to find it to check who her sponsors were or what church it happened in.

• Don’t copy someone else’s work, especially if they haven’t documented any sources. Tons of erroneous info is passed along the internet—don’t fall for it or pass it along!

• Do double-check someone else’s sources—they might not have copied all the relevant or interesting information, or they might have read a transcription wrong.

• Don’t trust the transcription—names are spelled wrong all the time and, again, while a transcription might list a name, a date, and parents’ names, the actual record might include a parent’s occupation, sponsors’ names, an address, and other useful information. (A transcription is a secondary source, someone else’s copy or interpretation of the information, unlike a document that is a primary source, such as a birth certificate or marriage license.)

• Do use primary and secondary sources whenever possible—if you have a transcription, try to find the actual record. If you’re using a compiled family history, try to find the actual sources they used. The more times information is copied, the farther away you get from the actual primary and secondary information, the more chance there is for errors to be made and passed along.

• Don’t keep your discoveries to yourself—we trace our family trees for our families, so if a distant cousin reaches out to you and needs help, share your work with them. You might never have met them, and they might be your fourth cousin five times removed, but, hey, they’re family!

• Do take breaks—family history research is mentally and emotionally exhausting, and especially when we’re constantly hitting our heads against a stone wall, it can be easy to want to call it quits. Sometimes it can be good to walk away for a month, a week, a day, an hour, clear our minds, and come back to our research with fresh eyes.

• Don’t get discouraged—genealogy is hard. Records aren’t available. Handwriting is impossible to read. Government agencies take forever to send you the marriage record you need to find out your great-grandfather’s parents and place of birth. Some of these problems will never be resolved, such as records that have been destroyed, so there’s no use in getting upset over that; everything else might require just a little patience.

• Do learn a new language—I don’t mean become fluent in Russian or Dutch. I mean, whatever countries your family originated in, whatever languages they spoke, learn to recognize the important genealogical words in that language—born, baptized, married, died, buried, parents, godparents, from (where they lived), etc. You might not be able to glean all the details of an entry, but if you’re looking through an eighteenth-century German church book, I guarantee it’ll be in German, and if you know these key words, they will absolutely begin to pop out at you and you will be able to take advantage of what might be an invaluable family record.

• Do keep a cheat sheet handy—keep a list of those words nearby. And if the region used a different alphabet than you’re used to, keep a cheat sheet of those letters and symbols, too. I do a ton of German heritage research, and they used four different standard alphabets depending on the place and time period; my cheat sheet is always right next to my computer.

• Don’t forget about history—it’s important to put our families into context. Maybe the entirety of world history is too overwhelming to cover and not quite relevant to our families, but if you can put an ancestor in a time and place, finding out more about what was going on in that time and place can help you understand things such as what a person’s occupation might have been, why a family might have emigrated out of an area, what a person’s religion might have been, whether or not someone might have served in the military, why a mother had five children all die young in a two-year period, and so on.

• Do look at other branches of your family tree—it’s tempting to just focus on our direct lines, but following sibling branches is extremely helpful in connecting to cousins, close or distant, which in and of itself can be rewarding, but which also sometimes yields a wealth of family history information that you might never have known about but that got passed down to them. Also, if you’ve been hitting your head against walls, sometimes the information you’re looking for—a birthplace, a parent’s name—that is missing on your direct ancestor’s documents can be found on the documents for one of their siblings, effectively opening up that dead end.

• Don’t think you’re ever finished—a genealogist’s work is never done, nor do we want it to be! I have been doing this on and off for twenty-five years, and while there have been lulls in discovery, I am still uncovering people and places and information that are new and exciting and opening up branches of my tree I never dreamed about.

• Do get out there as soon as you’re done reading this and start or keep digging!

Where your ancestors are buried can tell you so much about them and their lives. Is your ancestor buried in a church cemetery? They were likely involved in a faith community. If they were buried in a family cemetery, consider that it was very likely part of family land at one time.

Grave markers are a direct connection to our ancestors’ lives and may have clues, literally, written in stone. There is so much more to cemetery research than just the names and dates on the gravestones. Look around to see who is buried near your ancestors. It’s likely you will find connections, which may lead you to break down a brick wall within your family history.

Check death certificates, obituaries, and funeral home records to identify the cemetery where your ancestor is buried. Also, look at close relatives of your ancestor. If you’ve located where their sibling is buried, reach out to the cemetery office and inquire about others with the same surname.

Once you have the name of the cemetery, you’ll need to locate it. Findagrave.com and Billiongraves.com allow users to search for cemeteries around the world. Billiongraves.com allows users to collect photos of headstones and upload them to their site by using a phone camera app. Once uploaded, the photo is tagged with the GPS location and becomes available to all users. (I located an ancestor’s tombstone in Italy through this site!)

With that said, repeat after me...it is not weird to have a graveyard kit. Mine includes: a plastic pail, scissors and a trowel, wet wipes, garden gloves and disposable latex gloves, insect repellent, cemetery map with grave location marked, masking tape, rags, flashlight, cheap aluminum foil, whisk broom, notebook and pen, plastic grocery bags (I like clean knees, too!), drinking water, water jug that can easily be refilled, sunscreen, soft toothbrush, and old shoes. Keep your phone charged and handy, not only for taking photos but for your safety. With safety in mind, it’s best to have a partner with you.

By studying tombstones, we can discover facts about an ancestor such as hobbies, occupations, organizations, family members’ names, and military service. They may also include cause of death. While visiting a Boston cemetery, I located a tombstone showing a man pinned under the wheels of a cart pulled by running horses, a tragic event memorialized for eternity. Even the nearby plantings may be symbolic; oak trees represent strength, while weeping willows are the symbolic tree of sadness. Looking closely, you may see symbols that held greater meaning in a time when many people didn’t know how to read. Photograph the stones and notice the carvings, initials, and symbols. A Google search can easily decipher these. I consider cemeteries sacred ground where tombstones stand as monuments to an ancestor’s life, filled with rich genealogical details just waiting to be unearthed.

Some of them may lead you to a breakthrough...or, if nothing else, give you some insight:

1. The record doesn’t exist—some never existed to begin with (like my grandma’s birth certificate), or they are lost to time or natural disaster (like the 1890 census, which was largely lost to fire). Or maybe you are looking for civil records, when your ancestor was a Quaker and you really need to be looking at the Society of Friends’ meeting minutes.

2. The record exists, but it’s not online (yet?). There is still great value in visiting libraries, cemeteries, and other repositories of genealogical records! The one you need may be literally sitting on a dusty shelf in the basement of the city hall where your ancestor lived. (Ask me how I know.)

3. The record is online, but it’s not indexed (yet?). Thus, it is not easily searched for and found. Volunteering on Family Search to help index records won’t help you find your ancestor, but it will help other people find theirs.

4. You haven’t yet recognized or accepted that the “wrong” surname spelling might, indeed, be your ancestor! (There are enough reasons why this happens to fill an entire new blog post.)

5. There’s a typo (or other error) in the index, transcript, abstract, database, family history, or other derivative source. Check the original record if you can.

6. Terrible handwriting, and misreading of perfectly good old-fashioned script, causes errors at every level (original document, transcription, indexing).

8. Your ancestor truncated, Anglicized, or completely changed his name . . . but not because they forced him to at Ellis Island, because that’s a myth.

9. Your ancestor went by a middle name, or a nickname, and all you know is their first name—or vice versa—and they switched back and forth over time. Or whoever reported or recorded the data did.

10. It’s an original record, but it’s wrong. Who supplied the information? Would they necessarily know? How close in time to the event—birth, marriage, death, etc.—was the record made?

11. The census taker interviewed whoever answered the door (whether or not they were the best person to ask); he wrote down what he heard (without concern for spelling) or he was tired or confused (or drunk!) and skipped that street altogether.

12. The census says your ancestor was [a different race] because the census taker reported what he saw or was told. (I have an ancestor who was reported as black, white, and mulatto in different census years . . . and she was a slave owner, too . . . the plot thickens.)

13. People were living together in combinations you didn’t expect. (Who are these people with whom my great-grandfather is living as a child? Oh. . . . I see . . . his father died, and his mother remarried, that’s all.)

14. On the Ancestry search form, you have too much data in the search fields. Delete some of it. Or add an educated guess (e.g., a good estimate for a parent’s birth year is twenty years before first known child’s birth year) to see if it helps generate results.

15. You are looking for records of your female ancestor’s birth, but you are using her married surname. (In Ancestry, if you have her in your tree by her married name, delete the married name so Ancestry doesn’t think it’s her maiden name. Better to leave it blank if you don’t know her maiden name yet.)

16. Your ancestor may have been married multiple times. Which surname, or spouse, or children still living at home, would apply to the time frame you are seeking to know more about?

17. Your ancestor may have moved. Or, in one case, it turned out mine didn’t move at all, but the county lines kept changing around him from one census decade to the next.

18. You are looking only for vital records (birth, marriage, death). Try something new like land records, pension files, and newspaper articles.

19. You are focused only your ancestor. Try broadening the search a little, learning more about their FAN club (family/friends, associates, and neighbors).

20. You have made an error somewhere and are now off climbing someone else’s tree.

20 Greatest Questions to Ask Living Relatives

Excerpted with permission from FamilySearch’s “52 Questions in 52 Weeks” project and blog.30

1. What is your full name? Why did your parents give you that name?

2. When and where were you born? Describe your home, your neighborhood, and the town you grew up in.

3. Tell me about your father (his name, birth date, birthplace, parents, and so on). Share some memories you have of your father.

4. Tell me about your mother (her name, birth date, birthplace, parents, and so on). Share some memories you have of your mother.

5. What kind of work did your parents do (farmer, salesman, manager, seamstress, nurse, stay-at-home mom, professional, laborer, and so on)?

6. Have any of your family members died? If so, what did they die from? What do you remember of their death, and what were the circumstances of their death?

7. What kind of hardships or tragedies did your family experience while you were growing up?

8. Are there any unusual genetic traits that run in your family line?

9. What are the names of your brothers and sisters? Describe things that stand out in your mind about each of your siblings.

10. What were some of the family traditions that you remember?

11. Did your family have special ways of celebrating specific holidays?

12. Share a few memories of your grandparents.

13. Did your grandparents live close by? If so, how much were they involved in your life? If they lived far away, did you ever travel to visit them? What was that like?

14. Who were your aunts and uncles? Do you have any aunts or uncles who really stand out in your mind? Write something about them (names, personalities, events that you remember doing with them, and so on).

15. Where did you go to school? What was school like for you?

16. What were your favorite subjects in school? Why?

17. What subjects did you like the least? Why?

18. Who were some of your friends in school? What were they like? What are they doing today?

19. If you went on to get a college or vocational education, what school did you go to? What did you study? What memories do you have of those years?

20. What do you see as your strengths?