Genealogy has always been a big part of my life. I was recently looking online for the obituaries of my in-laws and stumbled across many obituaries for the other family in town that shares this surname. There are two distinct families and while I have always suspected that a name that unusual has to be connected somewhere back in time, I cannot prove it. So as I came across an obit that I know belongs to the other family, I copied it into a separate document just for that family with the intention of trying to figure out where our lines connect up.
Yesterday, I got the genealogy software I am testing working and needed data to plug into it to see how it works. The day has arrived to try to make sense of the other family and see how far back I can trace it. I began with what was the deceased patriarch and entered what I learned from his obit into the software. I added parents here, siblings there, and children too. Then I went on to do the same with all the other obits and info I had found. When I got finished, I had a fairly extended family and my sample family tree database had 66 people in it. I had names for a few of the under thirty set but was unclear where they fit into the tree I had created. It was kind of fun to see how much I could figure out without actually knowing the people I was researching.
Would it be easier if they were MY people? Absolutely! It would be nice to have names and documents to back up what I was finding. My rule was that I didn’t need it to be perfect it was just a test and I felt certain I would get stopped by lack of information almost before I got started. There are some people I am still not clear on, but I was even able to put together a fairly clear picture of some of the in-laws’ families. I was doing most of this without the benefit of typical genealogy research that I would normally do on my own lines. After about ten hours of messing around, I was very pleased with the results of my research and it was late, so I decided to call it a night.
Today, I decided that I had enough of a skeleton of the family to be able to find the patriarch and his generation in the 1940 census, which is the most recent one available to us. The program was alerting me right and left that there were potential matches, but of course, when I clicked to see these matches, they wanted me to pay for a subscription to see the little carrots of information they were dangling in front of me. No thanks. I decided to just Google the surname and city and see what that led me to. Well, it led me to loads of stuff about our family but also many bits and pieces about the other family as well. I was able to find photos to put with many of the names I had found yesterday. I had only four photos from obits before today, but now I have many more.
The problem I have now is one faced by all genealogists; how to protect the identities and privacy of living people. On the one hand, there is nothing I have found that is not freely accessible to the entire world, but on the other hand, I don’t have to put it all together and make it easy for some unscrupulous person to find either. Since my goal was and still is, to try to connect the two distinct families somewhere back in time, I decided to focus my research on the patriarch and try to go back from there. At some point, if I do make the connection between our families, I may reach out and see if any of them are interested in what I have found.
For now, this is all just an experiment to see how much I remember about genealogy research, how much things have changed in the twelve years I have been almost entirely away from it, to find what I can about our family along the way, and mostly to connect the two family lines or prove that they do not connect.
So, if you have always wanted to research your family, start at home and gather the family Bible if the births, marriages, and deaths get recorded in it and make copies of those pages and the title page. This is your first source document. If you are going to do this, be sure to always cite your sources from the very start. Title pages are important too, make a note on the title page of the date and place you found the source if it was in a library. Trust me, you may need to look in that book again sometime and will be glad to know which research facility you found it in.
You need to prove each connection as you go. Grab your birth certificate and make a copy for your files. It has your parents listed on it and is proof that they are your parents and when and where you were born. If your parents are still alive, ask them for copies of their birth and marriage certificates too. You can keep this up until you get back to the early 1900s or late 1800s. You can send off for the death certificates of your relatives if they have passed away, but you will need those birth certificates you have collected to prove you are related to them. I recently ordered several death certificates from the state and for each one I ordered, I had to prove I was the niece or grand-daughter of that person. This is why I tell you to start with yourself and collect the proof documents along the way.
As I so recently found out, it is not difficult to find information online about your family. You will need to be careful about trusting the information you find in many of the online family trees. Even an obituary is only as accurate as the knowledge of the person who acted as the informant, you will still need to prove these facts are true. An obituary or online family tree is not a source, but rather hearsay, until proven. So, trust but verify everything you find. Hopefully, you will be able to find trees that have proven all the facts with the source documents listed so you will just need to get copies of the primary source documents for yourself.
Have fun researching your family, and by all means, feel free to post questions in the comments below or contact me directly. I will do whatever I can to help you.
