Now that you’ve documented your living
relatives, it’s time to move on to those who are no longer with you.
But 1st, there are a few pitfalls
you need to be aware of. They can slow you down and have you barking up the
wrong family tree.
#1 BEWARE OF FAMILY TRADITIONS! A family tradition makes for a good story,
but they are seldom grounded in facts. Some
common family traditions are “Three brothers came over from _(fill in the
blank)_____. Once here they went their separate ways” or “One of our
ancestors married a Cherokee Princess.”
One from my own past goes like this: my
grandmother told everyone that her father, Freeman Scott, was found on an
island in the Ohio River as a toddler. He was raised by the Scott family. Since
all he could say was “Fremmie,” he became Freeman Scott. A few years back I started out with the
intention of finding what little I could on Freeman Scott. As I checked the federal censuses of Kentucky
(where my grandmother was born) I found not a Freeman Scott, but Aaron Freeman
Scott at age 1-month in the home of John Ross Scott. A little more digging and I found John Ross
Scott’s maternal grandfather was Aaron Freeman.
So it appears that for over 40 years my grandmother had been telling us
a huge fib. Why? I can only guess. Maybe
Freeman Scott’s parents didn’t like their daughter-in-law and cut them out of
his life.
The moral of that story is—listen to
the family’s traditions, BUT verify them with records before calling them fact.
#2 SPELLINGS DON’T COUNT. In the 40-plus years I’ve been researching,
I’ve 47 different ways my surname was spelled.
The first time I went to the library to scan the censuses on microfilm,
my wife came along to help. I was
reading on one microfilm reader and my wife was on another one.
She leaned over and told me she found a Caulley. I asked her how
it was spelled and she replied C-A-W-L-E-Y.
I told her that it HAD to be spelled C-A-U-L-L-E-Y, so it couldn’t be the right family. BOY, was I wrong! It WAS the right family and my wife never let
me forget it.
#3 DON’T GET FLAT FEET JUMPING TO ASSUMPTIONS! I assumed my surname CAULLEY
was originally McCaulley and they came over from Ireland during the potato
famine in the 1850s. I even went so far as
to purchase a nice wooden McCaulley family crest back when we didn’t have the
money. Later I found a document proving
the name was originally CORLEY and they most likely came from England in the
Colonial period.
#4 DON’T BE A “CUT-AND-PASTE” GENEALOGIST. Many genealogists find where someone else has
already “traced” their family, they get lazy and accept what the other person
did as accurate. They Cut-And-Paste the
info to their own tree to later find out it was wrong. All I can say is VERIFY and DOCUMENT what
someone else wrote.
Now that the CAVEATS have been dealt with, let’s move on finding
documents to prove your ancestry.
Probably the most useful document to
the beginning genealogist is the U.S. Federal Census. As long as you know your ancestor was born
before 1940, you have a name and place you can start searching the censuses for
your ancestors. From the census you
should be able to get your ancestor’s place of birth (state or country) and
their parents (if they were a child).
You start with the 1940 census and work back with each previous census –
1930, 1920, 1910, 1900, 1880 (the 1890 census was destroyed by fire),1870, 1860
and 1850. The 1850 census was the first
one to list everyone living in the hose by name. The 1840 census on back to the 1790 census
only listed the heads of households and tallied all the rest by gender and
approximate age.
Now that you know what documents (the
censuses) to look for, you need to know where to look. In the dark ages we had to go to a library,
check census index books then scroll through the microfilm looking for your
ancestor. Now, you can do it on line in
just minutes.
You can search for them using https://familysearch.org/search
FAMILY SEARCH.ORG. The site is free,
but you will need to register. This is
the LDS (Mormon) Church site.
Other records you may try to find are
marriage records, birth records, military records and death records. Some of these are available at the
FamilySearch.org site. Once there click
on the USA on the world map and then select the state in which you want to
search. Some of the records are indexed
and others are not. You can browse the
unindexed records.
FamilySearch.org, as good as it is,
doesn’t have all the records
available. So, you will probably want to
open an subscription account at http://www.ancestry.com Ancestry.com and http://www.fold3.com Fold3.com (a site that has military records).
I think that’s enough to mentally
digest for today.
TOMORROW: Kinds of Records & More Searchable Sites.
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