| I
Only Know My Grandparents
Ron
Wild advises on where to start when you only know the names
of your grandparents.
A guaranteed
way to get the heart of a genealogist pumping is to ask “I
only know the names of my grandparents, can you help me?”
The question invariably comes from a budding family historian
who is just getting underway and hasn’t spent a great
deal of time or effort in getting past this very common starting
point. A couple of well-directed questions and some intelligent
observation will put the whole matter in focus.
Questions such as “Where were your grandparents born?”
immediately come to mind. Although the person may not know
the answer, there are usually some family traditions or personal
memories that can provide helpful clues. “Where were
your parents born?” is another good question since it
is not unreasonable to expect that at least one of the grandparents
was born or married in the same place.
The classic approach however is to try for the most recent
vital record and the one that usually has the least amount
of restrictions associated with obtaining an official document.
This is the death certificate. Since the event is usually
recent enough for living family members to have personal knowledge
of the date and place, the death certificate is the record
that could supply vital links to age, nationality and place
of birth. Newspaper notices of the funeral and burial arrangements
are an extremely fruitful source of information since they
invariably list living descendants and sometimes siblings
of the deceased. Cemetery records can also prove useful since
it is not at all uncommon for funeral homes and cemeteries
to have extensive records on the events and people involved
in funeral and burial arrangements. Grave markers too can
list birth and death dates and occasionally other very valuable
information such as the place or country of birth. If the
death was accidental or unusual then likely a coroner’s
report would be available and these reports can provide extensive
background information that might provide details on occupation,
medical history and events and people associated with the
accidental or unusual death.
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An
1871 census for Ontario, Canada shows the author’s
wife’s maternal great grandparents Martin Candon
and Ann McDermott born in Ireland with family members
including grandmother Elizabeth (age 13) and Martin’s
older brother Bartley Candon (age 71). Martin Candon
and Ann McDermott are shown with their large family. |
Census information for this early- to mid-1900s period is
not available later than 1920 in the USA and even earlier
in Canada and England where the most recent census data is
from 1901 and 1891 respectively. All is not lost here, however,
since city directories are a powerful source of information
for this period, when you have found where grandparents were
living. Most large cities produced city directories every
year and it is often possible to track ancestors over a 20-year
period year by year. City directories usually provided the
address of the ancestor and frequently the occupation, opening
up other avenues of research, particularly if grandfather
worked for a large corporation likely to have an employment
application on file. This could reveal school or colleges
attended and the years of attendance so that these records
too become available with the wealth of background material
they could contain.
These are a few avenues of research for the grandparents who
were likely born and grew to adulthood in the early- to mid-1900s.
Now, let’s suppose that our budding research enthusiasts
are more mature, say 50 years old, and they too only know
the name of a grandparent. These grandparents were likely
born before 1900 so a whole new range of research resources
comes to hand, including indexed census information and in
most instances and countries a full range of birth, marriage
and death records.
Both my own and my wife’s grandparents’ records
come to mind in this respect and since neither of us knew
little beyond their names when we started they are relevant
to this article. My records covered mainly England with some
Irish and Australian events thrown in to keep things interesting.
My wife’s records covered five maternal generations
in Quebec and Ontario, Canada and three paternal generations
in New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts with even earlier
maternal ancestor records in Ireland. Since neither of us
had met our paternal grandparents and my parents and my wife’s
father had died fairly young, we were started with only vague
knowledge. My wife did not know the name of her grandparents
and I remembered that my grandfather’s name was Richard
Wild and only because my father had told me that my youngest
brother was named after his father. The fact that both my
wife and I have documented our ancestors back to the 1600s
should give plenty of hope and encouragement to those who
only have the limited amount of information that we had.
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| City
directories usually include the address of the ancestor,
and sometimes the ancestor’s place of employment. |
Had I known then what I know now, the search would have been
infinitely easier. We proceeded to do everything in the most
inefficient way possible and only the intervention of an incredibly
gifted niece and the opportunity to work as a volunteer assistant
at an LDS Family History Center got us back on track after
many disappointments and frustration-related stoppages. If
the following account can save you 10 percent of the frustration
that we experienced it will have served its purpose well.
It turned out that several generations of my Wild ancestors
and six generations of my wife’s Taylor ancestors were
on the IGI and Ancestral File at the LDS Family History Centers
but even hundreds of hours of analysis and conjecture and
a fortune in copying costs did not allow us to identify them
with any degree of certainty.
Then we learned the magic formula. Proceed from the known
to the unknown one event at a time. This is worth repeating:
proceed from the known to the unknown one event at a time.
Just as in real estate the formula is location, location,
location; the formula in genealogical research is basics,
basics, basics. Get a birth certificate, then look for the
marriage certificate, then look for the birth of the marriage
partners, then look for their parents’ marriage record,
and so on.
As shown above, seven basic records opened a floodgate of
ancestors for my wife and myself that will keep us busy for
the rest of our lives.
From a very unpromising beginning we have obtained hundreds
of documents ranging from IGI printouts to Ancestral File
pedigree charts, census and parish records, birth marriage
and death certificates documenting the existence of thousands
of ancestors all starting from the grandparents whose names
we hardly knew. If you have received some encouragement and
hope from this article then it has served its purpose well.
This
article originally appeared in the November/December 1998
issue of Family Chronicle.
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