12 Research Techniques That Can Produce Results

Ron Wild describes his favorite tips and tricks.

Listed below are 12 suggestions that can produce significant research progress when some information is known and the researcher is stuck and facing a "brick wall" situation. Some of the techniques are obvious but they are capable of creating the breakthrough to a new ancestral generation. They are not applicable in all situations, indeed some are only applicable to post 1900s situations, where in many parts of the world, there is limited access to public records.

Although city directories are not as accurate as a census, they were published far more frequently. The appearance and disappearance of families or individuals in a family can be important clues in your search.

1. City Directories
There are tens of thousands of city directories or postal directories available for most countries of the western world, some dating back to the 1700s. Most of these directories are indexed either alphabetically by surname or by street. When you have information that a particular ancestor was in a certain city and have an approximate range of years then it is a simple matter to refer to the directory at the city library or borrow a microfilm from the Family History Library (FHL).

The years in which ancestors appear and disappear in directories lead to many other areas of research including census records, vital records, newspaper files, passenger ship lists, naturalization records and cemetery records. Effective use of directory research requires that you have some clue about the ancestor that leads you to a particular city at a particular point in time.

2. Census Schedules
A very simple but enormously successful technique often forgotten in the excitement of making an ancestral census find is that of looking at adjoining census schedule pages in the same town, village or street. Frequently a brother and his family, or a sister and her family or ancestral in-laws will be found in the same general area where the ancestor was found.

It was not at all uncommon for early arriving immigrants to send home the funds to bring out brothers and sisters and wives and in-laws. Indeed, a book by Potter entitled To the Golden Door claimed that in the 50 years following the famine in Ireland over 75 percent of all Irish immigrants were able to come to America because of money sent by family who had arrived earlier and become established. Ties of kinship were very important to the Irish, as they were to other nationalities, so it is not at all uncommon to find families living with or close to one another. For this reason, when an immigrant family is found on a census, it is common for other relatives to be not far away.

3. Naming Patterns
Children are frequently named after grandparents and other family members such as aunts and uncles both paternal and maternal. Where there is evidence of this naming pattern in a family that you are having difficulty fitting to your ancestral line, you may assume a link subject to further verification and source evidence. Had the author used this technique 15 years ago, then the Thomas, Samuel, Richard naming pattern in the Wild family would have allowed identification of five generations of ancestors on the IGI much earlier than proved to be the case.

4. Baptism not Birth Dates
It is commonly assumed that the birth date of a child is usually within a few days if not weeks of the baptismal date. Certainly the tradition in most Christian parish records is to record the christening date of a child and the birth date is usually not known. This is particularly true of mid-19th century and earlier records. Using this assumed birth date, parents’ marriage and birth dates are estimated and candidates who do not fit the estimated pattern are often rejected. The truth is that the early christening was not rigidly followed and often years passed before a child was baptized. Indeed, some non-conformist congregations did not allow baby baptisms at all and waited until a child had reached the age of consent that was usually around seven years of age. For this reason it can be misleading to calculate a birth year to be the same year as the christening or baptismal year.

5. Surname Spelling Variations
There is hardly a surname in existence that has not undergone some change during the passing of the centuries. Some names have undergone significant change to the extent of not being recognizable at all in their earlier form. But even common names such as Smith appear in early years as Smithe and Smythe, and Taylor as Tyler, Tailor, Tailler. To reject an ancestral name because of a variant spelling is folly indeed. Spelling was not formalized until the late 1800s and many of our ancestors could not read and write and were subject to the spelling whims and fancies of the parish clerks.

The above extracts are from the 1891 census of Tyendinaga Township, Hastings County, Ontario, Canada and show four families who were found on an examination of District 73. Top, Bartley Candon is the brother of Martin Candon. Ann Candon the wife of Martin is the sister of Bernard McDermott and aunt of Lawrence McDermott.

6. Mapping out Ancestral Families
Our western societies have grown so explosively since the early 1800s that towns that once existed as separate geographic locations have become absorbed by expanding municipalities and acquired a new name. The old name is no longer used and over time becomes forgotten. The author's home town of Bradford, Yorkshire, England is a perfect example of this. With a population of 35,000 in 1800 Bradford grew 10 times to a population of 370,000 by 1895. Had I not had personal knowledge of all of the small towns and villages that are now incorporated in Bradford I would have completely overlooked many ancestral finds as not being relevant geographically.

Almost 95 percent of the parish records for Yorkshire are included on the IGI. If you had the modern information that an ancestor was born in Bradford then you would likely overlook all of the individuals who lived in the villages on the map on the next page since their IGI record would list the village name and not show Bradford.

It is important to obtain an old map and a modern map of the area in which ancestors were born and plot ancestral births, marriages and deaths on these maps on an individual basis. This will give you the information as to whether ancestral names from a differently named village than the one your ancestor came from could possibly be related. It will visually make obvious that ancestors from different towns or villages could indeed be family since the villages are geographically close. Maps can be your best guide when trying to link ancestral surnames from separate towns and villages.

7. Compiled Records
Most genealogical researchers have limited time available to search ancestral roots. With this in mind it is vitally important to first search compiled records before launching into original research. Nothing is more time wasting and frustrating than to spend dozens of hours on original searches only to find later that someone did it all 30 years ago. There are vast databases available for searching and in the space of an hour many can be searched for evidence of an ancestor. These include the IGI's 300 million records, Ancestral File's 100 million records, World Family Tree's 100 million records and Family Archives' 200 million records. Census Index CDs contain millions of names. Vital and Civil indexes contain hundreds of millions of names and linked database CDs too numerous to list from organizations such as Brøderbund, Ancestry.com, Heritage Quest, Everton’s, the LDS Church, Heritage Books, Progeny and many others. The American Genealogical Biographical Index, with 12 million early Americans, five generations of Mayflower descendants and Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution Indexes, The Canadian Genealogical Index's two million names, are all available in print at libraries or on CDs. Many of these CDs are listed on Family Chronicle's website CD Catalog at www.familychronicle.com or in the March/April 1999 issue of the magazine.

In this 1794 map, Bradford had a population of about 35,000 but this grew ten-fold in the next 100 years and dozens of the small villages surrounding the city disappeared as separate communities. Without knowledge of these “vanished” communities, it is easy to skip over one of your ancestors when searching the records.

8. Death Records
Many family history researchers have ignored death records, presumably because unlike birth and marriage records they don't show parents and the information recorded on death certificates is often presumed to be hearsay and of questionable accuracy. There may be some truth in this but what has been overlooked is the flood of other data that an accurate death date can make available. Newspaper obituary records come to mind and these frequently record spouse, sons and daughters and place of birth and burial. Cemetery records may reveal the existence of a family plot and other family members may be interred there. Funeral Directors may have lists of family and friends who attended the viewing and the burial ceremony. Religious persuasion and church attendance and all of the records associated with church activity that likely involved other family members become available. This is a good haul from having an accurate death date.

9. Naturalization Certificates
Many researchers expend great amounts of time and effort trying to obtain the US naturalization certificate for an immigrant ancestor, and understandably so since this is a family heirloom. However this certificate, while valuable, is not the record that usually contains much information of genealogical importance. Far more useful genealogically are petitions for naturalization and declarations of intent to become a citizen. These usually contain a wealth of physical details on an ancestor, birth date, date of immigration, port and date of entry into the US town and country of birth and frequently spouse and children and even parent names. After 1929 they even contain a photograph of the prospective citizen that may be the only photograph available. A book titled They Became Americans by Loretto Dennis Szucs is an excellent source for learning how to locate naturalization and declaration of intent documents.

10. Witnesses
Many original source documents such as vital and civil certificates of marriage, birth and death events carry on the certificate the names of witnesses. This is also true of many parish-recorded events, particularly post 1850, when many new forms for recording these events came into use. It is important to record these events in your notes for the ancestor in question. The witnesses are frequently relatives such as brothers, married sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, in-laws and every other form of family association. Keep them for future attention and invariably you will find that you have unearthed another branch of the family tree.

11. Linked Databases
With the advent of genealogy software, and the ability through GEDCOM (GEnealogy Data COMmunication) files, to easily transfer your data electronically, vast searchable databases are coming into existence. These databases are widely available but a note of caution in searching them is in order. Since the information submitted is not checked the accuracy of the information is questionable. Do not accept it without question but double check the source citations or re-check the data using the database information as a guide. Only then can you be sure that the information is accurate. When you do find mistakes, send your source citation supported corrections to the database so that others can benefit from your documented research. Some of the very large linked databases are Ancestral File, World Family Tree, Ancestry World Tree and hundreds of others from organizations such as DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution), NGS (National Genealogical Society), NEHGS (New England Historic Genealogical Society), Genealogical Publishing, Heritage Quest and Progeny.

12. Missing Birth Records
Many researchers are delighted to find a census record that lists an ancestral family but when they search for a birth record for the ancestor they want they are not able to find it. Apart from the fact that census records are notorious for recording names and ages inaccurately, one technique that may help reveal a mother’s maiden name and help facilitate the location of parents’ marriage records is to search a sibling birth record. Since they had the same parents, the more siblings the more chances you have to find the ancestral parents’ records. Frequently the missing ancestor was illegitimate and registered under a maiden name or the given age or given name was improperly recorded.

This article originally appeared in the May/June 1999 issue of Family Chronicle.