May
20

It may be wise to engage some professional assistance. This might be because you live a long way from the repository that could have the piece of information you need, or because you don’t have the necessary skills to undertake the work yourself. Understanding land transactions, reading old Germanic handwriting and knowing what the preamble in an English will says are a few examples of where employing an experienced professional may be a great move. While you may be reluctant to spend $200 getting someone to visit the record office on your behalf, their knowledge, experience and expert eye may be worth every cent if they can track down what you need and interpret it for you.

There are a number of professional research organisations worldwide whish offer research services. In Australia, the Australasian Association of Genealogists and Record Agents provides a membership list (www.aagra.asn.au), while in the UK, its equivalent is the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (www.agra.org.uk). The Association of Professional Genealogists (www.apgen.org) has a worldwide remit, although most of its members are in the US. At www.sag.org.au, you’ll find a list of people who have undertaken a Diploma in Family Historical Studies and who are now available for private commissions.

At the end of the day, having research problems and brick walls is what family history is all about. If it was easy to get back to medieval England or the Vikings, there would not be the thrill and excitement of finally solving that vexing research problem that has been keeping you awake every night for years. So don’t give up when you hit a brick wall. Go back to basics, review what you already know and see if there is a clue you’ve missed. Share your problem by advertising your research interests online and seeking out a local family history society that may have the expertise to advise you.

There may be a lot of chipping away at the base of the brick wall before it comes crumbling down for you, and your opportunities to leap over it in one single bound may be few and far between. However, the most important thing is to find a way over, around or through it – only then can you continue your journey and climb further up that family tree.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

May
14

Another basic principle of family history is not to re-invent the wheel. You should not assume that you are the first person to have traced your family history. It may be that someone else currently researching the same family, or uncle Bert who did the family history in the 1960’s, solved the problem that has currently brought your research to a stop.

Contacting others who are researching your family history has become increasingly easy with the Net. There are a number of sites, both free and paid, where people can advertise their research interests to others. Two of the largest of these are Rootsweb’s World Connect (www.rootsweb.com) and Genes Reunited (www.genesreunited.com).

The World Connect project is a free service. It boasts almost 5 million surnames, provided by researchers from around the world. The useful feature of World Connect, apart from it being free, is that the contact email address of the person who contributed their research is provided once a successful search is completed.

Genes Reunited is a paid service. The current subscription is a modest $19.95 for one year’s access to its database. In this case, the contributor’s contact details are hidden. After you successfully find a common ancestor, the site prompts you to send an email to the contributor, but you don’t get to see their contact details until they are willing to provide them to you. Up to that point, you basically use the Genes Reunited as a postbox and it delivers the mail backwards and forwards between subscribers!
The great feature of both of these sites is that you are able to do searches in a number of different ways. The flexibility can help you overcome some problems you may have encountered in your research.

For example, one of the problems in tracing female ancestors is establishing a maiden surname. You may have found the baptism of your ancestor, Thomas hills, son of John and Mary in 1780 at Ryarsh in Kent, England, but Mary’s maiden name is not provided on the church baptismal register. Unless you are able to trace the marriage of John and Mary, Mary’s maiden name and further research on that line is fairly much at a dead end.

Using both World Connect and Genes Reunited, you are able to estimate birth years and do searches for people just by given name and area without having to specify other details such as surname. Fir example, we could do a search for all people with the given name Mary born in Ryarsh between the years we think she may have been born. This may well see you on the way to finding ‘your’ Mary, as other researchers may already know from different sources that ‘their’ Mary Bowden married Thomas Hills in Ryarsh.

Don’t forget, too, the power of Google. Many family historians around the world have their own Web sites where they’ve published details of their research. Just putting the name of one of your problematic ancestors into Google and hitting the search button, may help you find a distant cousin who has built a Web site that features ancestors you have in common. Simply type in your ancestor’s name in quotation marks (for example, “John Packman”) followed by the search term genealogy or family history and/or the name of the place that you know that person lived. So, your whole search string may look something like: “John Packman” genealogy. Such a search instantly produces a list of Web sites containing information on the family history of someone called John Packman.

Increasingly, these days, social networking sites are also being used by family historians to get in touch with others who have similar research interests. The most popular of these is Facebook (www.facebook.com). While you first have to register (for free) before being able to use the site, once you’ve done so, you are well on your way to discovering people with the same surname as the one you’re looking for. Increasingly, too, there are a number of Facebook pages dedicated to getting everyone with the same surname together as a group within the site. For example, there is a Stieger Facebook page where anyone with that surname (or an interest in it) can join and be hooked up with others of the same name or interests. There is also an increasing number of Facebook groups that concentrate on one specific town or region, and this can be another place to find others with common research interests.

Technorati Tags: , ,

May
13

Almost anyone who traces their family tree, no matter how experienced they are, will eventually hit a brick wall – an ancestor who doesn’t seem to have been born and refuses to die, or one whose arrival into Australia cannot be located – affectionately known as a ‘swimming’ ancestor! Here I explain why these brick walls occur and give some clues on where to go to overcome them.

Back To Basics

It’s never too early or too late – to go back to basics and focus on the principle of family history research. The UK Web site, GENUKI (www.genuki.org.uk/gs) has a good online beginner’s guide that is worth having a look at, whether you are just starting out or have been at it for a while, but have hit a brick wall and need some inspiration. Let’s go over some of those basic principles to keep in mind when doing family research and see how they can help with your brick walls.

Firstly, we can become so familiar with the family we are tracing that we can’t see the wood for the trees. We know so much about our ancestors and spend so much time thinking about them that the blinkers go on and you assume certain facts. A brick wall in your research can occur simply because you are too close to the problem and don’t see an obvious answer. The grandparents you knew and loved when you were little were very respectable and went to church every Sunday, so they couldn’t possibly have forgotten to get married, could they? You’ve searched for years for their marriage, but it just isn’t there. Maybe one of them was already married to someone else, and so was prevented from legally taking another partner. Yet you’ve always ignored the man with the same name as your grandfather who you’ve found in the indexes getting married a few years earlier than your grandfather supposedly married your grandmother, because it can’t be him, can it? These are the sort of obstacles we put in our own way that make our brick walls even more difficult to climb.

Always analyse the documents you have obtained along the way – dig out those certificates of births, deaths and marriages and look at them again. You may well have become so familiar with them that you may have overlooked a small fact that could make all the difference in solving a research problem. Or you may know some further facts about the family that suddenly put the information on a certificate into a new light for you. Perhaps you missed that the witness to your great-grandparents’ marriage had the same surname as the bride. That could be the link establishing which Mary Jones you are looking for, because the witness to the marriage, Ezekiel Jones, may have been her brother. If finding the birth of a Mary Jones has been your brick wall in the past, now knowing that you are looking for a Mary Jones who had a brother Ezekiel Jones can make all the difference when looking through countless birth indexes.

It is also important not to ‘skimp’ on documentation. One of them main brick walls Australian researchers encounter is the difficulty they have in pinpointing the exact place their ancestors came from overseas. Without that vital piece of information, research can often come to a grinding halt. The main sources for finding the place of origin are the relevant birth, death and marriage certificates on which that immigrant ancestor’s details appear. The birth registration of every one of Charles Schmidt’s children was an opportunity for him to state his exact place of origin. You might already know he came from Germany, but without a more precise village or town name, it will be impossible to continue your research – especially with a name like Schmidt! On the birth certificates of 12 out of his 13 children, his native place may be stated as just ‘Germany’. But perhaps on the thirteenth certificate, for whatever reason, an exact birthplace is stated, providing you with a way forward with your research. Unless you’ve made the effort to obtain every one of those children’s birth certificates, you may never be able to take your research any further, as looking for a Schmidt in Germany is like looking for a proverbial needle in a haystack.

For details of what information is available on birth, death and marriage certificates in Australia and current costs for obtaining copies of certificates, visit Cora Num’s gateway Web site at www.coraweb.com.au.

The answer to your research problem may also be just waiting to be discovered in resources held by other family members. It could be that an entry in a family bible that has been handed down through the generations will confirm you have found the right baptism for your ancestor in Hertfordshire or that an apprenticeship indenture verifies the occupation of your ancestor. It is important not to overlook the fact that family documents, photographs and important memorabilia may still exist and could have been handed down through branches of the family other than your own. As part of solving your brick wall problem, you should consider moving forward in time and trying to research some of the indirect lines of your family (the brothers and sisters of your great-grandparents and their descendants, for example) down to living generations of the family who may just have in their attic the one document that could solve your research problems.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Page 1 of 11