Finding Your Badass Kin-Genealogy 101
You know your kinfolk are out there … but beyond the names of parents and maybe a couple of grandparents, most people have no idea who their ancestors really are. How are you supposed to venerate and honor and work side by side with your people when you don’t even know their names? That’s where some full-contact genealogy research comes into play.
In this day and age, with the technology and resources we have available to us today, anyone with an inquisitive mind and some basic critical thinking skills can unearth the stories of their badass ancestors … and that’s a crucial thing to keep in mind: the stories. You can write down names and birthdates on a chart all day long, but until you’ve actually learned about the history and cultural context of the people in your family tree, you’re only getting half of who they are. The more you learn about the place and time in which they existed, the richer your connection with them will become.
Be warned, though: genealogy is an addictive and time-consuming hobby. You’ll find yourself up until the wee hours of the morning, your partner sleepily asking when you’re coming to bed while you stare at a census record or a probate court document murmuring I’m so close to figuring this one out … and holy cow, honey, I just found someone new …
Genealogy is a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle, except after a little while you realize you don’t actually have the box, so you have no idea what your puzzle will look like when it’s done. And as if that wasn’t terrifying enough, you’ll have one clump of pieces here and another clump over there that you know are connected but you have yet to identify the pieces that go between those two clumps. And a little bit after that, you’ll have the epiphany that your puzzle doesn’t even have edges—it’s just going to go on forever, spreading outward and twisting over itself like a weird genetic spiderweb with you sitting happily in the center, surrounded by endless piles of marriage certificates, family bibles, and newspaper clippings.
One of the biggest questions people have about genealogy is How much does it cost? While paid genealogy research sites like Ancestry.com provide a valuable service and can be an incredible resource for people searching in countries other than their own, much of the information you need to get started can be found for free. At the beginning, a library card and some creative Googling can be a great way to kick off your genealogical quest for knowledge. There’s a really good chance that someone has already done the work for you and all you have to do is simply connect with them.
Whether you choose free or paid services, remember that the information you obtain is only as reliable as its sources. Be sure to document everything you find, and always include original source material, e.g., scanned photos, court documents, book citations, etc., when you have access to it. There are numerous inexpensive and even free genealogy software applications that will allow you to scan or copy documents, photos, and other items into your database, so be sure to do it religiously. Otherwise, it will become nearly impossible to fact-check later on if the need arises.
Sites like Ancestry.com, Legacy Family Tree, and MyHeritage Family Tree Builder all have free versions you can access for little to no cost, although you’ll typically have to upgrade to a paid version to use all features. Be sure to check the list of genealogy resources in the back of this book for information on where to find forms and charts.
Scan photos and documents and other items and save them digitally—use cloud storage if you have it or keep these files on your hard drive (remember to make backups regularly!). Use file naming conventions that make sense such as lastname_firstname _typeofdocument_year.jpg. For instance, my scanned image of the 1881 federal census, taken in Kentucky in which I identify my great-grandfather, Christopher Columbus Basham and his rather large family, is called Basham_CC_Fam_KY_FedCensus_1881.jpg. The Buckinghamshire marriage license for William Dean and Harriet Moore is Dean_Moore_MarrLic_Bucks_1862.jpg. Whatever file naming system you use, be sure to use it consistently and logically. If you don’t, then at some point you’ll end up with two dozen files all called CensusRecord.jpg, and that’s not going to do you any good at all.
Charts and Recordkeeping
To begin researching your people, you’ll want to use what’s called a basic Ahnentafel chart. I know it sounds like a weird and scary word that you’d find in the potions room at Hogwarts, but bear with me here. Ahnentafel is a German word that means ancestor table, and it provides a method for organizing direct ancestors numerically. The main person—you, in this case—is always number 1.
Your father and mother are 2 and 3, respectively. Your grandparents become 4 and 5 on your dad’s side, and mom’s parents are 6 and 7, and so on. While this might seem confusing, you’ve probably seen an Ahnentafel chart before but didn’t know it—it’s sometimes referred to as a pedigree chart. The benefit of using a sheet like this is it shows your complete, direct line of ancestry all in one place. You’ll find information in the appendix on where to find blank Ahnentafel charts.
As you go further back and unearth the stories of additional generations, you can add them easily. Keep in mind that a family history project isn’t something you want to rush through—this isn’t about just scribbling down as many names and dates as possible, in the shortest amount of time. Instead, view it as a labor of love, because it truly should be one. After all, if you want to work with your family members on a spiritual level, you really do have to take the time to get to know them. It will become a lifelong journey.
Start by putting yourself in the number 1 position. Write down the obvious things about yourself—your name, where and when you were born—because some day, someone else might be looking at this chart, trying to figure out who you are and what you did. If you’re doing this on a computer, feel free to embellish it with a photo, or a link to a database where you’re keeping additional stories.
For your parents, add your father at position 2, and your mother at 3. Just like you did with your own information, include their dates and places of birth. If they’re deceased, be sure to add where and when they died. If you have a pair of same-sex parents, put the older one at the top, even number, and the younger one below at the odd number. Continue and add all four of your grandparents in the same way, as well as your great-grandparents (if you have their information). Remember, if you don’t know specific dates or places, you can always add them later.
Here’s where things get tricky for most people. Depending on your age, and the age of your parents and grandparents when you came along, you may only know the pertinent information for a couple of generations back, and that’s okay! It just means now you need to start asking questions. Start by talking to your living family members. Ask them questions about their people. Here are a few things you should keep in mind as you begin to delve deeper into your family line:
Step 1: What Do You Want to Find?
There are so many different ways to approach family history; figuring out what your focus is will help you in your research. Maybe you want to find out if it’s true that you had an ancestor who sailed on the Mayflower or was hanged as a witch in Salem. Perhaps you’re curious about the place your ancestors lived in before they came to America. Maybe you just want to find out your family’s history throughout the ages. Start with the known—yourself and most likely your parents—and work backward into the unknown. Keep in mind that the longer you wait to get started, the fewer opportunities you will have to speak to people in older generations.
Having a target in mind will help you concentrate on a specific area of research. Maybe you want to focus only on your mother’s line because her people have been in the United States since 1700 and will be easier to track down than your father’s people, who came over from Poland during World War II. As you seek out that target information, you’re going to find a whole lot of interconnected stuff that you didn’t even know was out there; save all of it, because it will be relevant later as you continue to build your jigsaw puzzle.
Take any potential stories about your family you want to explore and figure out where you can get more information. Things like newspaper articles, military records, the National Archives, and even Wikipedia might help you with the specifics of a story. If you’ve heard rumors that you’ve got a famous (or infamous) ancestor, this can also be a great place to start, because it’s not just interesting, it’s entertaining and will make for some nifty dinner table conversation.
After thirty years of digging around in my family tree, I discovered a very remote and obscure connection to a gentleman named John Henry Holliday, a dentist by training, born in Georgia, died in his thirties in Colorado. This might have been yet another name in the cousin collection except that John Henry was better known by his nickname, Doc, and was famous for a gunfight at the O.K. Corral, along with his buddy, a guy named Wyatt Earp. Interestingly enough, my children’s father is distantly related to Earp, so everything seems to come full circle.
If you’re hoping to build a general family history, it’s okay to cast a wider net than focusing on a specific person or group of people, but remember that the broader your target search, the more information you’re going to have to parse through as you go. That sifting can become overwhelming, especially if you’re new to ancestry research. Allow yourself the luxury of scaling back if you need to, just to avoid burnout. Also, remember that not every ancestor is going to be easy to find right off the bat. That’s not a bad thing, but it can present a unique set of challenges. If you hit a wall on one branch of the family tree, you can either move forward with other ancestors or keep at it by finding creative solutions to unearthing these elusive kinfolk.
Step 2: What Information Can You Start With?
It’s really tempting to start looking for distant ancestors right away, but doing so can be counterproductive. Break out the old photo albums in Granny’s cedar chest—old pictures and diaries and bibles can be a gold mine for clues. Talk to your living family members. Remember that whatever you’re told might not be completely accurate due to how memories and stories change over time, so also be prepared to use research to confirm what you hear. Ask questions, especially of the older folks, because they’ll probably be thrilled that you’re interested in what their lives were like before you came along. If they don’t live nearby, mail or email them a questionnaire, with questions on it like:
• Where and when were you born? Did you have older or younger siblings?
• Where did you grow up? Do you remember the house you lived in as a child? How did your family come to live there?
• Were there other relatives that lived nearby, like your grandparents, cousins, or aunts and uncles? Did you spend a lot of time with them?
• Where did you go to elementary school and high school? Did you attend college or join the military as a young adult, or did you enter the work force? What were those experiences like?
• Did you practice a particular religion when you were growing up? How often did your family go to church, temple, or other religious events? Is it the same religion you practice now? If not, what changed for you?
• What were the most important national or world events in your lifetime? How did you feel about them when they were happening, and afterwards?
• Who is the oldest relative you remember from your childhood? What do you remember about them? Are there any family stories that we’re related to someone famous?
• What is the full name of your spouse? How did you meet? Where and when did you get married?
Use your Ahnentafel chart and family group sheets (remember the Appendix has information on where to find blank charts) to figure out what you’ve already got. You might be surprised to find that you have much more information at your fingertips than you were aware of. As an example, I had a box of papers from my late grandmother’s apartment that, when finally opened years after her death, contained not only her marriage certificate from 1935 but also her birth certificate, my grandfather’s birth certificate, their original social security cards, and my grandfather’s military discharge paperwork. It was a treasure trove of places and dates, right there in my own desk drawer, and it allowed me to create a more complete picture of their lives, their marriage, and my grandfather’s military service.
Step 3: Start the Research.
This is my favorite part because I’m a history major who also happens to be an information junkie. As you move from the known to the unknown, build the information on each person. Consider things that are more important than just the name—as an example, one of the English branches of my family tree had an unfortunate habit of naming everyone either William, George, or John. I have seven men whose information I have unearthed, born within one decade and five miles of each other, all named William Dean. At least two of them married women named Harriet, and two more married women named Elizabeth. Learning about them individually helps me keep them straight: there was William the blacksmith, William the farrier, William the carter, and so on.
Use other facts to figure out whether you’re looking at the right or wrong person in the records, because if something doesn’t match up, you could end up on the wrong branch of the tree … or even someone else’s altogether! I was trying to find an obscure birth certificate for a person with a fairly uncommon name. I finally found what I thought might be the right one, because the name, location, birth month, and day were correct … but he would have been five years younger than the ancestor I was looking for. This wasn’t necessarily a problem, because mistakes can and are made (I’ve found people whose birth years were simply written down incorrectly on official documents) but then I found him on a census record. Under the “Race” column, he was listed as Black, as were his parents. Since the man I was hunting was most definitely not a person of color, I knew this couldn’t be the correct person, even though I really wanted him to be. I eliminated this guy from my search and eventually found the right birth certificate … for a white guy, in the right year.
If you’re in doubt about whether or not the person you’ve found is really the correct one, try going forward in time to narrow things down. If you know Captain Wentworth married Anne Elliot in 1821 but you find a record for him marrying Louisa Musgrove in 1820, you’ve probably got the wrong man—find the correct Captain Wentworth, because he’s out there.
Census records are a great way to figure out if you’re looking at the right person because you can see who’s associated with them. Entire households are listed together. If your person shows up with a bunch of names that aren’t the ones you’re familiar with, it may not be the right individual at all, so you’ll need to explore further. In addition, you can also use census records to figure out who lived next door or on the same street. A significant pile of my ancestors all lived in the same census district in western Kentucky, and I can track their migration from one decade to the next simply because their households are listed on adjacent pages all over the area surrounding the town of Hawesville.
Some people find that creating an actual timeline is one of the best ways to keep track of which ancestors they’re hunting for. Are you stuck on someone who was born in the nineteenth century but can’t track down their birth certificate? That’s okay. Begin with their date of death, add in the year they got married, and work your way backwards. It’s possible that the birth information will turn up later, or at the very least, you can work with an approximate year in which they were born.
Keep in mind that particularly with older records, you might find variations on someone’s date of birth, so allow yourself the flexibility of a year or two (or even more) in either direction. People lie about their ages all the time, and record-takers sometimes get things wrong not for any nefarious reasons but simply because human beings make mistakes. Some of my great grandmother’s information says she was born in 1892 and other things say she was born a year earlier. Which is right? Who knows … but I know that if I find information on someone with her unique name in either of those years, it’s worth exploring. Look at the big picture when comparing facts rather than just homing in on a single one.
Get Organized
You’ll need a way to keep track of everything you find—photos, records, et cetera. If you’re using a genealogy software program, they can generate forms like pedigree charts and family group sheets. Online databases like Ancestry and Family Search allow you to create your records in their system. If you want a program that can be used offline as well as when you’re using the internet, consider Family Tree Maker, which will sync to Ancestry if you tell it to.
If you’re not someone who likes to use digital databases, that’s okay, although it does mean your work will be a little bit more labor-intensive. You can create folders, notebooks, shoeboxes—you name it—but the key is to develop a logical system. Keep your Smith ancestors in one binder and the Jones family in another. Create separate sections for various branches of the family as well as a place where you can store copies of important primary documents, photos, and more.
No matter how you choose to organize your information, it’s important to be consistent, and stay organized from the very beginning, if you don’t want to find yourself bogged down in piles and piles of documents with no rhyme or reason. There’s no one right (or wrong) way to keep your family history work organized, but ideally the best method is the one that works for you personally. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re organizing your ancestors, whether it’s digitally, on paper, or a combination of the two.
• Decide exactly what you need to keep organized. Is it primary sources, like birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and census records? Are you also going to include information found on websites; pages photocopied from history books; and images of people, places, and events?
• Do you want to organize by surname, by family group, or by location? Will it be easier to keep your English and Irish people in one place, for example, with your South American ancestors in another folder or filing box?
• In addition to keeping digital records of items you’ve scanned, you’ll need a place to safely keep original copies of older documents. A birth certificate from the turn of the century or a newspaper clipping from the 1800s is not going to last long if you toss it in a shoebox. Consider investing in archival quality sheet protectors so those papers are still legible in the future.
• If you’re someone who loves folders and filing, consider using a color-coded system. Use blue for your paternal grandfather’s ancestors, green for your paternal grandmother’s, red for the ancestors of your maternal grandfather, and wrap it up with yellow for anyone related to your maternal grandmother.
• If you’re tech-savvy, consider adding metadata to your digital images, either via a graphics editing software or through special photo labeling programs. Metadata is descriptive information embedded into the digital file itself which is great because it stays attached to the image. If you move it to another computer, share it by email, or post it online, that data will always be there, so anyone who opens that photo will know it’s a photo of Cousin Johan and Aunt Rumi on their visit to a Parisian café back in the 1950s.
Keeping organized from the very beginning is going to pay off in the long run. Remember, genealogy research is a marathon, not a sprint. If you want to get to know your ancestors, this is going to be a lifelong project, so take the time to do it efficiently from the start.
Types of Records
There are billions of records out there to be explored, depending on who you’re looking for and what you’re trying to find out. Many are available and free to the public, although you may have to do some creative digging to locate places of residence. Nearly all records will fall into one of these categories:
The United States Census
The federal census has been taken every ten years since 1790, and most of the records still exist today; unfortunately, most of the 1890 census was lost in a fire. Because there is a 72-year limit on access to census records thanks to privacy concerns, as of 2020, the most recent census you can access is from 1940. Don’t worry, though; you’ll be able to get your hands on more eventually, because the 1950 census will be released to the public in 2022, and the 1960 one in 2032.
The National Archives has the federal census on microfilm available from 1790 to 1940, and most have now been digitized and are viewable online via websites like Ancestry.com and Family Search.org. The best way to work with census records is to start with the most recent one and work backward. If you find someone listed in a census for a particular year, don’t stop there! You can figure out numerous family relationships by checking other census records in either direction. Following census trails, you can figure out who moved out, who was born, who probably died, who moved back in, and who got married.
For census records prior to 1850, sometimes the information is a bit sparse; it may only include the name of the head of household—which is pretty much always going to be a white male—and the number of other people living in the home. In some states, that number will be broken down by race, as well as free or enslaved status, and includes gender and age groups of residents, for free whites, free people of color, and enslaved persons. From 1850 onwards, the federal census included information on every single person in the household, including their name and race, how old they were when the census was taken, and where they and their parents were born. It also includes how they were related to the head of the household, their occupation, and sometimes whether they could read or write English.
While the National Archives lacks the resources to do census records searches on your behalf, you can find this information at the regional National Archives locations in a dozen U.S. cities, as well as on numerous websites. You can also check with your state archives and your local public library to see what databases they have available to patrons as part of their access.
Census records exist in other countries as well and can be a wealth of information that takes you down the rabbit hole of making family connections. As an example, in an 1861 census record in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, Elizabeth Ruggins Dean lives with two of her four adult children—her husband had run off and left her some twenty years before. In 1871, someone else appears in the household, a 35-year old man named Edward Ruggins, who is listed as Elizabeth’s nephew. Traveling two decades backwards to 1851, in the same town, and on the same street, fifteen-year-old Edward appears with his parents, John and Sarah Ruggins. With this information, I was able to discover that Elizabeth was not only the sister of John Ruggins, but also the daughter of Joseph Ruggins and his wife Fanny, and the granddaughter of Charles Reynolds. If I hadn’t stumbled upon adult Edward in 1871, I’d have never connected Elizabeth to her parents and grandfather.
If you study enough census records, you may start noticing patterns that clue you in to the history of industry in a region, which is all part of constructing the story of your people. A significant chunk of my family hails from the aforementioned High Wycombe, and during the nineteenth century, it was a production center for the wooden Windsor chairs—today, there’s even a High Wycombe Chair Museum! But even if I didn’t know this already, I’d have been able to figure it out by the occupations listed for many people in the town. It wasn’t just my ancestors, but their neighbors too worked as benchmen, bodgers, and framers, oh my!
Birth Certificates and Baptismal Records
A birth certificate can tell you not only when someone was born but where, and give important details about the child’s parents, often including when and where they were born, too. Be sure to always use birth names in your genealogy research. That means that if Mary Miller grew up to marry John Jackson, don’t list her as Mary Jackson. Keep her as Mary Miller in your recordkeeping. Birth certificates are state issued documents, so they can contain very different levels of information. My birth certificate from one state doesn’t show my parents’ names at all: I’ll have to order the long-form record from the Vital Records department if I need that information, but my children’s paperwork from the next state over includes both me and their father.
One of the issues with birth certificates is that they’re harder to obtain than death or marriage records, again, because of privacy issues. I don’t want you to be able to get a copy of my birth certificate—and you likely don’t want me having yours—until long after I’m dead. Typically, you’ll run into roadblocks obtaining birth records issued in the past hundred years. Most US states have a time period of several decades after the birth before anyone can obtain those records, and some states even have a waiting period after the person is dead. Some places will allow you to order non-certified copies of birth certificates for genealogical research purposes. Check with the municipality where you want to order a birth certificate and proceed accordingly.
If the birth record is more than a century old, you should have no problem getting it if it exists, but that’s another genealogical conundrum. Most states in the US did not have a standardized record keeping system for vital records until around the end of the nineteenth century. Some places were better at recordkeeping than others; if you’re looking for birth certificates in New England, for instance, you’ll have more luck than someone hunting for that information in Arkansas or a rural village in eastern Montana. You might be able to find information at a county level instead, in newspaper birth announcements, or in family bibles. In many places, there was no formal registration of a child’s birth, but you can instead use baptismal records from a parish registry.
Not everyone is baptized these days, but it was pretty common in the past. A baptismal record will list the date of baptism and the child’s parents. It may also list the date of birth, or at least help you narrow it down through process of elimination; if someone was baptized in April 1832, you know that they could not have been born in December 1832, or in 1833. These are mostly only found in church records, and they vary widely in the information they contain, but can be great sources for names of children or other relatives, and clues about where to look for property or other records.
Death Certificates, Wills, and the
Social Security Death Index
Some genealogists recommend starting research with death certificates, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s the most recent record, so it’s going to make it easier to follow the “move backward” approach to family tree research. Remember, a death certificate is issued in the place where the person died, not where they are buried; the two are not always the same thing.
At the very least, a death record typically will include the date and place of death, the cause of death, and very often information about either the decedent’s spouse and family, parents, or both. Next of kin will be listed, and typically you’ll also see the name of the deceased person’s father and mother, although like with birth certificates, this varies by state.
Often, you’ll get lucky and the death certificate will tell you where and when the person was born. Even if it simply says the age, that will give you a target idea of where to seek out birth records. Someone who died in 1910 where the age at the time of death is listed as sixty years old was born in 1849 or 1850. Keep in mind, though, that other than the date, place, and cause of death, most of the information on a death certificate is supplied by a family member, who is often referred to on paper as the informant. If the informant was certain her father was born in Missouri and was sixty years old when he died, but he was really only fifty-eight and was born in Illinois, that can throw off your search. Consider that when you’re following up on additional leads based on death certificate information.
Although today many people have a will, in the past, it was something our ancestors often did only if they had property to leave behind. Those who had nothing, or who were illiterate, typically didn’t leave wills. However, if you’re lucky enough to find a will from an ancestor, you can learn things like the names of their children, spouse, or siblings. Be sure to check to see who signed as the witness for the will, or whose names are mentioned in probate—these can give you clues as to the names of other close friends or family members.
The Social Security Death Index, which is searchable online, will tell you the date of death, date of birth, when and where a person’s Social Security number was issued, and the city where benefits were last paid. It is fully searchable online and easy to use. However, this only helps for those ancestors who had Social Security Numbers issued and who are now deceased, so it isn’t much help before 1950, and is somewhat incomplete up to around 1970 or so.
Marriage Records
Public marriage records will include the date of the marriage, the age—and sometimes date of birth—of those being married, and often their parents’ names. In many cultures, the place of marriage can be a great clue to find the bride’s birthplace, as the wedding typically took place in her hometown. Also, in older marriage records, you may find the names of a family member of the bride or groom—an aunt or uncle, older sibling, or a cousin—signing as a witness.
When you search for marriages, it’s tempting to hunt with the names of both spouses. However, in most databases, this tells the system that both names have to appear in the records for you to have a successful hit. In the event that the marriage record was indexed incorrectly, it might never appear in your search results. For instance, my 2x great-grandmother was named Susan Tinnell on her marriage certificate … but on census records, living with her parents, she was Susan Tindle. When I searched for her marriage to Christopher Columbus Basham, Susan Tinnell never appeared, and it looked as though the marriage hadn’t taken place. To bypass this issue, search by one spouse at a time. Once I hunted for Christopher Columbus Basham by himself, his marriage information popped up. As a bonus, you might find that your ancestor was married more times than you were aware of! Be aware that if a woman was marrying for the second time, she’ll be indexed not under her maiden name, but under her married name from the first time around.
Also remember that in years gone by, people often used their nicknames on their legal paperwork. William becomes Bill, Albert is Al or even Bertie, Elizabeth turns into Eliza or Betsy or Bess, and Mary is Molly, Polly, or something completely different. That marriage between Jonathan and Margaret could be listed as Jon and Peggy. Not only that, Jonathan could be listed as Jn, because abbreviations were popular and commonly used in the past. Jonathan’s brother William may not be Bill but Wm, and their cousin George is Geo. And their sister Margaret? Forget Meg or Peggy—she’s now listed as Mag t and Aunt Elizabeth is Eliz th.
Sometimes you’ll run into a case where there’s just no documented marriage record at all, because your ancestors got married some place that didn’t require it to be formalized with the court. Other times, as I encountered in Hanover County, Virginia, the courthouse where records were kept was destroyed by a fire. Under these circumstances, you can look for alternative information, like the posting of banns—this was a tradition in England, colonial America, and several European nations announcing a couple’s plan to marry on a certain date, and typically had to be repeated two or three times before the marriage could take place. If you’re doing your genealogy work in middle-period Europe, check parish registers for notes of marriage services. Look for marriage announcements in newspapers as well—you might not have your great-something grandparents’ marriage license, but that lovely write up in the city newspaper’s Style section will provide lots of juicy information.
Passenger Lists and Naturalization Records
Immigration records, whether they come from a ship’s manifest or a naturalization record, are useful, because if your ancestors emigrated to the United States, they had to get there somehow, and for most of history, that meant a ship. Passenger lists usually enumerate every single passenger, so they are good for linking spouses and children; they often include ages, too, as well as port of origin. Entire families are listed together, which can be incredibly valuable. The passenger list of the ship Susan and Ellin, which sailed into the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1635, shows me that not only was Joanna Pynder—or Pinder, depending on which source I’m looking at—just fourteen when she left her home in England, but also that she traveled with her mother Mary, as well as four of her sisters, all of whom are listed by name, along with their ages. I can also tell that Joanna’s father Henry and her two brothers didn’t sail on the Susan and Ellin, so they must have come to Plymouth on some other ship at another time.
Many colonial ship records are available online, as well as in historical societies and the National Archives. If your people voluntarily came to the United States between 1855 and 1890, Castle Garden was the first official immigration center in America, and you can search their online database for the records of over ten million immigrants that arrived from 1830 to 1892. After Castle Garden, Ellis Island became New York’s processing center for new arrivals, and more than 20 million immigrants passed through the gates between 1892 and 1924; nearly all of their records are searchable online and often include photographs and digital images of documentation.
Naturalization is the process by which an immigrant becomes a legal American citizen, so these records can provide a researcher with information such as an ancestor’s date and place of birth, their occupation if they had one, the year they came to the United States and how and when they arrived, and information about their home country. If your ancestor emigrated before 1906, any court—municipal, county, state, or federal—was permitted to grant citizenship, so you’ll need to contact the state archives where the naturalization took place, in order to search county and local court records. These state and local records are not typically available through the National Archives. Records for naturalizations that took place after 1906 are maintained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and are generally only available to view at a National Archives location.
Also prior to 1906, federal law extended American citizenship to the wife and minor children of any male naturalized immigrant. This means that once the head of the household was naturalized, so was the rest of the family; unfortunately for those of us who like to do research, it was not required that the wife or children were named in the records.
Draft Cards
Today any young man who turns eighteen has to register for the Selective Service. In the past, they filled out draft cards, which come in handy for finding men who would have been the right age for military service. Several drafts have taken place in U.S. history, and even if your ancestor never served in the military as an active duty member, he might have had to fill out a draft card.
These can give you name, date, and place of birth, place of residence, and even sometimes a physical description. For many, there is also a box that includes the name of a person who will always know how to find the individual’s whereabouts. This is typically the wife, a parent, or a close sibling.
Another great feature of the draft cards issued during the two World Wars is that of occupation and employer. By looking at a pair of draft cards from World War I, I was able to piece together that my great-grandmother’s first husband had, after abandoning her and their baby, gone off to Kansas City, where he lived with and worked for his sister’s husband as an electrician before moving to Arizona, where he eventually ended up in a transient camp before dying in a hospital.
Information on the draft cards was supplied by each registrant personally but then written down by a registrar. While there was certainly a chance that there might be a spelling error or transposed letters, each person had to sign his card to attest that the information was recorded accurately, so the margin of error is fairly insignificant.
Family Bibles
A family bible can be a treasure trove of info if you can find one; in many cases, the record of someone’s birth, marriage, or death, only exists because someone wrote it in a bible. For a good part of history, at least in the years before vital records registration was mandatory nationwide, family bibles were used to document the more significant events in the history of a family. They were also used in many cases by families that needed to prove when—and even if—these events took place, for legal matters like determining an heir, securing benefits for military pensions, or even enrolling a child in school. By the early part of the twentieth century, the family bible—often a prized possession and a valued gift to newlywed couples—was becoming obsolete.
If you’re lucky enough to have come into the possession of a family bible, it’s a great starting point for information! But like every other aspect of family tree research, consider your sources, and evaluate how reliable they are. Because information was often added years after an event took place, it’s possible that some dates are inaccurate. Be sure to check the bible’s publication date; any births, deaths, or marriage that took place prior to it but are still written down could be suspect. At the very least, you’ll want to find corroborating evidence elsewhere.
If you didn’t inherit the family bible, don’t sweat it—neither did most of the rest of us. However, if you know there’s one out there somewhere and you just haven’t been able to locate it, reach out to relatives first. It’s entirely possible that your third cousin Ardelle has it sitting on a shelf in her family room surrounded by her Precious Moments figurines. If nobody has it but everyone swears it exists, check online auction sites and used book dealers; family bibles come to them via estate sales all the time.
You can also search online for people who have taken the time to transcribe family bibles in their possession. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) website has an online index of more than 80,000 family bible records, all fully searchable. The Library of Virginia has several thousand bibles in their repository, many of which can be searched for records of families in that state.
Obituaries
When I was a kid, I loved reading the obituaries in the newspaper. These very public death announcements are awesome because they will nearly always list the names of the survivors—that means the spouse and kids and grandkids—and sometimes the names of the parents and siblings. You can also use it to identify close family members who may have predeceased the person in the obituary.
Keep in mind that like many other documents, an obituary is written by the survivors of the deceased, so while you can hope that they’re accurate in their recollections, it’s also important to consider this a secondary source rather than a primary one. After all, you don’t know who wrote it! Again, it will provide some good hints for where to look next for original documentation. I had an ancestor who had sort of disappeared from the records for several decades, and for thirty years, I was unable to find his death record, even though he’s most definitely dead by now. However, by reading his sister’s obituary, I was able to identify the state in which this missing ancestor lived in his later years, and that helped me redirect my search to the Southwest, where I finally found his death certificate.
Where do you find an obituary? The most obvious spot would be the hometown in which your ancestor lived, but that might not always be the right answer. Relatives in other towns may have published the obituary in their local paper as survivors. Perhaps the deceased lived in Tampa but spent his formative years active in the community in Chicago—it wouldn’t be unreasonable to post a death notice in a Chicago paper. Maybe a paper in a small suburb was chosen over a larger metropolitan newspaper because of price constraints—some papers charge a fee to print a death notice, others don’t. If the deceased was older and had moved in with caretakers in a new town, the obituary might be in the local paper, rather than the place where the person spent the bulk of their life.
To find an ancestor’s obituary, keep your search broad and then narrow the field—this will help you avoid missing clues that are hidden in strange places. In addition to searching with the word obituary, also use death notice, funeral, in memoriam, or memorial. If you know that the person died of something other than natural causes, you may be able to find newspaper articles that aren’t obituaries but still contain leads to follow later. I’ve never found a formal obituary for the mother and her four children that died on the same day in 1883 in Kansas … but I did find a newspaper article detailing the horrific fire that killed all five of them. It included the date of their deaths, the names of the surviving family members who escaped the blaze, and far more ghastly details than I really wanted to read.
Sometimes, obituaries will give you clues as to where the person is buried as well. If funeral services are included as part of the notice, you’ll be able to determine what cemetery to look in for headstones or other memorials. They sometimes will include cause of death, although not always. Watch for key phrases like passed away after a lengthy illness or died unexpectedly for clues.
In addition to obituaries, be sure to check out crowd-sourced websites like FindAGrave.com and BillionGraves.com. These are user-generated from volunteers around the world who have taken the time to document headstones and grave records. You may even be able to find a photo of the gravestone, which is wonderful information to have in cases where you can’t find an obituary for one reason or another. Once you’ve identified a family member on one of these sites, you may see comments and legacy notes from other family members whom you didn’t even know existed, and you’ll have found one more piece in your genealogical jigsaw puzzle.
Historical Context Clues
As you’re working, uncovering all the weird little nooks and crannies as you shake out the branches of your family tree, be sure to look at the bigger historical picture of your ancestors, and ask WHY they lived where they lived. When your people came to the United States or whatever country they landed in, what was happening in the place they lived before? Was there a war, civil unrest, famine, religious persecution? Why did your ancestors settle where they did? Why did they move when they did? For example:
• Many American families relocated in the early years of the twentieth century in search of new opportunities. Often, they left economically depressed rural communities and headed to the big cities. My great-grandmother and at least two of her siblings left their holler in western Kentucky, took a train north, and settled in Chicago.
• During the years of Jim Crow, many African Americans fled the oppressive South in what came to be called the Great Northern Migration, and went north to industrial hubs like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland looking for employment.
• The US government has issued land grants several times to encourage migration. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened up settlement in the wild frontier of the western United States. This legislation allowed any American, including freed slaves, to claim up to 160 free acres of federal land, if they lived on the land for five years and paid a nominal registration fee. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, more than fifteen thousand homestead claims had been established, by families both black and white.
• Ireland’s Great Famine (1845–1852) caused a massive wave of immigration. When the country’s potato crop failed and Britain’s government instituted a policy of forced removal of food staples like barley, wheat, oats, mutton, beef, and eggs, more than half a million Irish immigrants entered into the United States via the port of New York alone. According to the Library of Congress, in the 110 years between 1820 and 1930, some 4.5 million Irish arrived in America, the majority of them women.
• Some twelve million individuals were taken from Africa and enslaved; according to the Dictionary of American Slavery, more than half a million of those ended up in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If you’re researching enslaved ancestors in your family tree, be sure to check out the specific list of related resources in the Appendix.
The Issue of Name Changes
In this day and age, when everyone’s information is everywhere, you’d be hard pressed to change your name and get away with it. The name on your driver’s license matches the one on your credit card and on your student loans and probably on your Facebook profile. But for our ancestors before us, things weren’t always that cut and dried. Name changes happened a lot—whether by accident or design—so when you’re hunting for missing kinfolk, it’s important to keep a few things in mind about name changes.
First of all, there’s a popular myth that millions of Ellis Island—and before that, Castle Garden—immigrants had their European names Anglicized by immigration officials who couldn’t communicate properly with people who were Hungarian or Czechoslovakian or whatever the case may be. More than being not entirely true, this idea is hardly ever supported by historical research. Consider the process by which immigrants entered the United States during periods of mass migration.
Passenger lists were compiled at points of departure, where the immigrant purchased a ticket. This means that if you left from Hamburg, you were buying a steamship ticket in Hamburg from someone who spoke your language. If you purchased your passage in Palermo, the person who sold it to you spoke Italian, just like you. When you got on the ship at the port in your home country, your name was written in the ship’s manifest—again, by someone familiar with your language.
Once you arrived at Ellis Island, your paperwork already in hand, completed back in the Old Country, you were met by an immigration inspector who had a copy of that ship’s passenger list, complete with everyone’s name written on it. At least one out of three immigration inspectors were foreign-born, and most spoke multiple European languages; inspectors were often assigned to their duties based on which language group they were most familiar with. It’s unlikely, simply because of the types of people working at Ellis Island, that a foreign name would confuse an immigration inspector.
In the 1950s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) went through millions of records of entry into the United States during the past century because there were people trying to obtain citizenship, after decades in the country, whose identity didn’t match their immigration paperwork. This was problematic, obviously, because it meant the immigrant would face issues with not only naturalization but also with access to voting or fair trials in legal matters. The INS discovered that records of entry for many people did contain errors … but it wasn’t because no one at Ellis Island understood them or forced them to Anglicize their name. In fact, nearly all of them happened because:
• The immigrant used a fictitious name—or that of another person—when they left their home country, which could happen for a variety of reasons
• The person’s name was accidentally misspelled by a clerk in their home country, possibly by someone who was unfamiliar with that particular spelling; Shepherd might be written down as Shepard, Sheppard, or even Cheppard
• They were a child recorded with the surname of a stepfather, grandfather, or uncle they traveled with, instead of their biological father
• Errors were made due to naming conventions in other countries that didn’t translate correctly into American documentation
• Women were registered under their maiden names rather than their married names
• The immigrant himself altered the name or translated it into English, to make it easier to pronounce
Certainly, there are plenty of American name-change stories, and many don’t involve immigrants from other countries at all. Keep in mind that the idea of everyone knowing how to read and write is a modern novelty; go back through a century or two of census records, and you’ll see variations in family spellings for the same person. My tenth great-grandfather’s name was spelled at least three different ways: Basham, Bassham, and Bassam … and two of those three versions appeared in his last will and testament!
Build a Story for Your Badass Kin
While you work to uncover your people, don’t collect just names and dates. As you learn more, collect the history of the place and time, and the stories of the people themselves. I know that Owen Coltman was born in 1867 in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire … big deal. That’s fairly boring, right? But knowing that Owen emigrated to America in 1888 via Philadelphia on a ship called the British King, settled in Chicago, and then sent for his wife Elizabeth and their son George, helps to humanize Owen and bring him to life. Elizabeth and George arrived in New York City in 1889 on the White Star liner Britannic. Owen and his wife eventually had four more children and several grandchildren—one of whom was my great-grandfather.
I can tell you that Lady Catherine Camell was born around 1444, was married twice, and lived all the way to age sixty-five—not unimpressive for a woman of her time, but still fairly generic and bland. Or I could tell you that her first husband, a French lord, was arrested for attempting to overthrow the king, and then murdered in an insurrection just two years later. Or that Catherine soon remarried to an English knight, and became the grandmother of Sir Francis Weston, who was beheaded by King Henry VIII in 1536, following accusations that he’d been fooling around with Anne Boleyn. Suddenly, Lady Catherine just got a whole lot more interesting, didn’t she?
You can easily say that your ancestors left one country and went to another, and then just be done with it and move on to the next name on your list … or you can learn about the culture and society of their times, so you can feel what it must have been like. Learn how long it would take to sail from Liverpool to Boston in the winter, or how many days it would take a cart to travel from Richmond to Roanoke. Find out why the Slovakian town your people left in the 1930s has changed its name three times in the past century and a half. Listen to the narratives of formerly enslaved people and hear their words and their stories of heartbreak and desperation and hope. Read about what it was like for the Scots when the clearances came and the pipes and tartans were outlawed, and they fled the English landowners, and weren’t even allowed to speak Gaelic to one another.
Do you know what your ancestors ate? What foods were available to them, in the places and times that they lived? I’m fascinated by food anthropology—I like to study the cultural context of the things we eat and why we eat them. I’m convinced that a lot of things my ancestors had for dinner were eaten because these people
were just too poor to eat anything else. My great-grandmother was from western Kentucky, and her daddy—whose occupation was formally claimed as “woodsman”—probably brought home possum and raccoon and squirrel for supper, and she and her stepmother would have cooked up greens and some hominy to go with it. You can’t tell me that was considered high end cuisine.
Brush up on the cooking and staple diet of your kinfolk, whether it’s the maize and bright vegetables of your Mexican abuela’s family, hearty thick stew from a European connection, or the meats and plants of an indigenous population. Learn about what your people ate and why they ate it, because it humanizes them. It makes them more than just names on a chart.
What did they wear? Figure out what people of their social station would have done on a daily basis. Research the politics of their era. Was there religious conflict? Did someone coming through a port city change their name to something less Polish sounding so they could fit in with their new neighbors in America? Did an epidemic of cholera sweep through a Navajo village one day and wipe out everyone but the infant who would one day become your family’s matriarch?
Take the time to do the work and learn who your people really were. Get to know them and immerse yourself in their worlds. Because these are the things that bring us closer to our ancestors and help us to honor them.
When You Have an Absent Parent
Ancestor work can be emotionally challenging. If one of your still-
living parents was absent from your life while you were growing up, or if you’re currently estranged from them, ancestor work can feel downright exhausting at times, but you may find that this parent’s people are going to get involved in your business. Here’s why.
Grandmothers and other ancestors have a tendency to call things as they see them. If your parent has been uninvolved in your life, don’t be surprised if that parent’s grandparents or great-grandparents start taking a special interest in you. It’s possible that they’ll feel extra protective of you, since their son or daughter—or grandson or granddaughter—has made the choice not to be part of your life. In cases like this, the ancestors of an absent parent are often our strongest advocates. They take on a protective role in an almost apologetic way to make up for the shortcomings of the person who abandoned us.
Just like living grandmothers and grandfathers sometimes step in as surrogates and help raise kids in extended families, our dead ones often do the same thing. Some people say that our ancestors are our first line of defense, and that includes when they need to step in between you and someone else who couldn’t be bothered to be part of your life. If a parent has bailed out on you at some point—or your relationship with them is so toxic that you’ve decided to avoid them—don’t be shocked when their people come rolling in to tell you what’s what. If you want to ask them to serve as a substitute for someone who’s missing in your world, all you have to do is ask—odds are good that they’ll be honored and they’ll oblige.
Honoring Ancestors When You’re Adopted
Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, you may not have any idea who your badass ancestors could have been at all. There are a variety of circumstances that can cause this to be the case, but it’s most certainly going to come up if you or one of your parents are an adoptee. For some people, the notion of kinfolk is quite simple: it’s blood related ancestry, and that’s it, period. However, for many other people—both within the magical community and outside of it—your family is the group of people who raised you and loved you, whether you’re connected to them by DNA or not. If you agree that the idea of building a family tree is to tell a story, then that story includes the people who claim you as kin whether they’re related by blood, marriage, adoption, or some other connection.
In the not-so-distant past, adoption was kept secret; families didn’t discuss it, and many people grew to adulthood with no idea that their parents were not biologically related to them. Now, however, there is far more open discussion about the subject, so if you were adopted as a child, you’re more than likely aware of it. You may even know who your biological parents were. Regardless of whether you do or not, your ancestor work presents its own unique set of opportunities.
Yes, opportunities. Because you’ve got the luxury of working with twice as many ancestors as those who are not adopted. Your adoptive family chose you, so you get to claim them as part of your ancestry, even if they aren’t related to you by blood. They picked you out and raised you, and your adoptive parents are your mom and dad. Ask any parent of an adopted child which kid they love better—their adopted one or their biological one—and you’ll get the same look of confusion and disbelief that you’d get if you asked the parent of two biological kids which one is their favorite. You’ve grown up around them, you’ve seen their family photos on the wall, and you’ve listened to Grandma’s hilarious stories about her gin-crazed youth over Thanksgiving dinner. Your family loves you, and you love them—because you’re family.
You also have the option of working with the ancestors of your biological family. Now, you may not know who they were, but they know you. There are a number of different ways to do this, but it can be tricky when you’re not entirely sure where your predecessors came from. The first way, and one that works for many adopted people who have chosen not to pursue their biological parents’ information, is that of honoring archetypes. Now, this is still going to require a little bit of research, but it’s not nearly as complex as embarking on a DNA treasure hunt.
An archetype is a symbol—and we’ll cover this in a lot more detail in chapter Eight. Let’s say I know that I’m of Eastern European ancestry, but not much else. That’s not really a lot to work with, is it? There’s a whole lot of random Eastern European people I could be connected to. However, with a little digging, I discover that there are some legends among Eastern European countries that I find I really connect with. Taking it a step further, I learn about, for example, a folktale from the Carpathian Mountains about a woman who lives in the woods, protects children from hungry wolves, and brews up magical potions. Was she real? Maybe—folktales often have some basis in reality. Maybe not—but regardless, she might be a good place to start. If I think of her as an archetypal ancestor, rather than a blood ancestor, I can still pay tribute to her as a symbol of the many people whose blood could be running through my veins.
Another way of connecting on an archetypal level is to do an ancestor meditation, which is a good way to let your mind wander back in time to see if you can connect on a metaphysical level with either individuals or archetypes who resonate with you spiritually. To do this, find a quiet spot somewhere near your ancestor altar (see chapter Three).
Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Think about who you are and what you are made of, and know that everything within you is the sum of all your ancestors. From thousands of years ago, generations of people have come together over the centuries to create the person you are now. Think about your own strengths as well as your weaknesses, and remember that they came from somewhere. This is a time to honor the ancestors who formed you. Call out to them—you don’t need their names—and ask them to visit you.
Address them with respect. You can say something simple like, Grandmothers, grandfathers, all of my people, I ask that you come into my life to guide me, protect me, and aid me. Grandmothers, grandfathers, all of my people, I honor you, and welcome you to join my life.
As you reach out to them, there’s a good chance they will appear to you and present themselves either as individual people or as archetypes—the warrior, the healer, the wise woman, the spiritual guide, and so on. No matter how they appear to you, welcome them and use these images as a foundation for your ancestral work.
It’s also important to note that many people—not just adoptees—can claim some sort of mixed heritage. Although you may have grown up believing you were descended from a particular ethnic or racial group, the odds are good that you’re connected to others as well. Most of us can’t tell by looking in a mirror who our people are … or aren’t. While DNA testing like that available from Ancestry and 23AndMe might be helpful in narrowing down a region—and result in some surprise cousins—it doesn’t always tell the whole story. For instance, I’ve got people in my family tree that came from a small town in what is now Slovakia; they’ve been in that little village since around the thirteenth century. However, they’re not really Slovakian at all. They’re ethnically German, descended from a group of people who left Germany and went east, colonized this particular area in the Košice region, and then intermarried within their own family groups. Slovakians on paper, Germans by heritage.
In addition to honoring biological and archetypal ancestors, there is also the concept of the family of the heart and soul—these are the people who love you and count you as family, either by blood, by choice, or by happy accident. They may include your best friend’s mom who let you sleep over every Friday night in high school, or your spouse’s dad who likes to take you fishing, or that wonderful distantly related cousin that shows up at random to just drop off novels she knows you would like. Family of the heart and soul, for many people, is as valuable as the family you’re genetically connected to, and we’ll discuss those in depth in chapterSeven.
If you’re an adoptee, or if there’s some other reason you don’t have a connection to your biological family, don’t sweat it. There are plenty of other ways to find a spiritual kinship to ancestral guides.