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Sunday, August 4, 2019

10 'Easy' Things About Genealogy

I am fortunate to have several like-minded genealogy friends and we get together regularly to share our successes and crowdsource ideas for working through brick walls. So this week's #52Ancestors prompt "Easy" got me to thinking. The suggestion was to write about an ancestral line that had been easier to research than others, but my mind went in a different direction. There are many mistakes my friends and I have discussed over the years that are all too easy to make when researching your family history, as well. Here are just a few that come to mind.

It is easy to:
  1. Stick to the mainline and forget to research your FAN club (Friends, Acquaintances, and Neighbors.) Follow collateral lines, e.g. siblings, particularly for obituaries and death certificates. 
  2. Romanticize your ancestor's motives or overlay current values onto the lives of our ancestors. Our ancestors were criminals, slaveholders, bigots, bigamists, and all manner of other things, which can be disturbing to learn. Gather your facts and read more about the viewpoints people held at that time to broaden your perspective of the influences that shaped their lives. 
  3. Assume because you have a few facts you have the full story. Just because your ancestor is in the same location in 1900 and 1910 doesn't mean they stayed in the same place the entire decade. Back up your assumptions with facts. 
  4. Get so caught up in researching you forget to document your findings. Have you ever had to retrace your steps in pursuit of a record you found previously and can't find again? Then you understand the importance of taking the time to document your sources. 
  5. Limit your research to what is easily obtainable online. Ah, the allure of armchair genealogy! Yes, we all want to lounge around in our pajamas and gather as many records that way as we can. But, eventually, if you want to do a thorough search you have to venture beyond what is available online. 
  6. Forget now fluid spelling can be. Search engines have gotten smarter and smarter at being able to make connections between similarly sounding names. You still have to do your homework, however, and come up with a list of alternative spellings as well as leverage other details to make locate records when the name is completely wrong or poorly transcribed. 
  7. Assume that all of the children enumerated in the census have the same parents. 
  8. Assume any of the details at all in the census are correct. They are a great guidepost, but can you corroborate each fact with other records? 
  9. Assume any of the information found on an uncited online family tree is correct. Online trees can be incredibly useful, but undocumented research should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. 
  10. But most of all, it is so, so easy to get so caught up in researching you find yourself tumbling down the proverbial "rabbit hole" staying up way past your bedtime, allowing dust bunnies to accumulate and ignoring other household chores! But, unlike the other things on this list, is that really such a bad thing?
Copyright 2019 by Lisa A. Oberg, GeneaGator: Vignettes of Yesteryear. All Rights Reserved.

1 comment:

  1. All so true! Thanks for reminding us how "easy" it is to stumble down the wrong path.

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