After some decades of making enormous leaps, mis-connections and enjoying the occasional eureka moment, I thought I would share some of the tools that have held up for me both to be self-critical of the family-tree, tale-telling process and because others might find something of use here.
In a general way, I think of four tools that are available in analyzing the family story. I’ll label them proximity mapping, family reporting, digging rabbit holes and DNA testing.
Proximity mapping
By far the most useful tool, proximity mapping tells a lot. It is the process of getting to know the “map,” that is who lives with and near whom in both time and space. For centuries, family tended to live together until science, custom, exploration, repression and opportunity cut into the equation that village life was about the same as family life. Ethnicity and local flavor emerged out of the continuity of family life. And to find someone in the same village almost screams of a multifold of genealogically interesting connections.
As this breaks down in the 19th century, so does a sense of surety over the correctness of the linkages. Yet, it is still useful even now. Looking at the phone book in my large city, I see family in the common surnames and I know for a fact that many of them are related to me even though we have never met. Home still means a connection to place.
In terms of determining proximity, these are the general sources that are useful:
- Censuses
- Directories
- Tax records
- Court and official records (petitions are great)
- Land records
- Church records
- Newspapers
Starting with the surnames of interest, it is useful to construct lists. The closer you can get to the target the better – a landmark the family lives near, a village rather than a county and even being next to each other in a list (try to look for records that have not been alphabetized). The closer you get, the more likely that you have a match. The danger of proximity, of course, is that the closeness tells you that there is possibly a link but not what the link means. Just because two people with the same surname and general age are close together doesn’t mean they are siblings. They could be cousins, for example, a very likely scenario in the times when nuclear families were not so closed. The nightmare scenario, of course, is that they could be random occurrences of the same name in which you will waste years investigating before finally determining that the connection just doesn’t hold up – see rabbit holes below.
Finally, these lists tell you not only what to expect from the families with the same surnames but they help to predict and verify how the neighbors might be related. The extended families often stayed together and moved together when they needed to. At the very least, you know that they likely knew or knew of each other – which then can explain why they are called together in court cases or both take a job with a company in a far away place. In the grand scheme, where people are mobile, the occurrence of a Sophie Smith with a John Coombs in the records of Pittsylvania, Virginia and then her occurrence again five years later in the records of Cheyenne, Wyoming, means something. It does not prove she is the same person but it increases the probability of a family relationship enough to make it worth looking. When you find that five or more people are tracking together, it becomes likely that they trekked together. That is the beauty of making sure that you are not so focused on a record that you filter out the names that mean nothing to you. These names will come back to haunt you.
Of course, proximity is also dangerous. If it is all you have, then, well, its all you have. Children are born out of wedlock, families raise cousins, heck, I even have a case of an adopted great grandmother who was raised by a family with the very same surname – but unrelated. So part of the challenge is to go beyond these proximity lists, even when they make strong correlations. A slight exception is when the proximity records explicitly tell you the relationships as the church records and later censuses do and even, once in a while, the tax, court and newspaper articles. For this, one delves into family reporting.
Family Reporting
A bit of advice when I first started was to interview every elder member of the family and only start to hunt after you have mined every bit of available knowledge. Honestly, that advice holds up. That is where the knowledge is and it makes absolutely no sense to start asking records what the actual family can tell you. In fact, it would be a waste of time. But, as you go on, you will find that the family remembers what they want to remember. Life is so full of twists and turns, jealousies and embarrassments, that history gets sanitized. And as we get closer to the current date, memories are as much an issue. People lose touch. They remember what they will and fill in the blanks to avoid living with the unknown. The point is that firsthand reports are always hiding something or even imagined. The story just gets socially written by the family and then it becomes gospel (and don’t expect any thanks for challenging this bedrock!).
Here are the sources for family reporting I know in descending order of believability:
- First hand reports told to you
- Wills and court cases
- Church records
- Newspapers
- Land records
- Census
I suspect that it may be surprising to some that the census record might be rated on the absolute bottom of reliability. The problem, I have seen, is three-fold: first, the linkages are often made by a tired third party record taker who fills in the blanks to finish the day before stopping in for a mug of the favorite brew; second, families tell the most respectable story (for example, nobody says, oh yeah and that is my bastard child) and; third, the family reporter is often whoever is home that day and he or she may or may not know all of the facts (or any of them at all). An example of the last problem is the super useful category in the 1880 US census that asks for the parent’s place of birth. Many kids simply never asked or didn’t care where their parents were born, they assumed that it was some place they remember them mentioning living in and that’s that. There are no repercussions for making it up. Census records are a great first source. They must, however, be verified or they are meaningless.
Wills give, on the other hand, enormously important information. In general, they leave nobody out, because they can be challenged for doing so. They can span three and even four generations, give important particulars such as land and they are often witnessed or administered by more distant family members because they require as much trust as possible. That doesn’t mean every name in a will is going to go somewhere on your tree. Neighbors, friends and colleagues (especially if they fought with a veteran who is writing the will) are often included and this will help you to expand and verify your proximity lists. And the biggest caveat is that there are often names of clerks, folks who write the wills for the illiterate and just plain people who seem to make a living out of witnessing wills and they can send you way down the wrong path fast. What do you do with these rabbit holes?
Digging Rabbit Holes
My sense is that we all want to avoid ending up like Alice in a wonderland of nonsense by jumping down a rabbit hole that is going to take us nowhere. But if you are doing your job, you will do it. Not just once but over and over again. I have learned that these rabbit holes are actually an important tool in verifying and expanding your family tree. First of all, it is not only your rabbit holes that are important. As you read the published genealogies and the endless pixels devoted to the recitation of facts gleaned from other online genealogies, you will find yourself beginning to question and trying to understand what to do with things that just don’t seem right. Trust yourself. The most promising thing in genealogy is that there are more folks than ever to catch mistakes and question the baloney. Crowd sourcing will eventually question this stodgy corner of an uptight world. And we get there by going voluntarily down the rabbit holes.
A rabbit hole then is an elaborate story that has all the right stuff to be believable. This is the stuff of Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me or the Liar’s Club. It catches you because you WANT to believe it. The point isn’t that you have been fooled but that the story had enough truth to capture you. Two big clues to a rabbit holes are a beloved family story that is passed down through the years and the existence of an aristocratic ancestor (unless you happen to be Shaka Zulu’s granddaughter or Prince Henry).
The beloved family story rabbit hole – Early on I found the story of my ancestor who was supposedly a bengali prince captured while bathing and taken to live in Cornwall. I love the story. The image is breath taking and the break from the mundane is refreshing. Not to mention, it has made my visits to Bengal a little bit of a pilgrimage. Rabbit holes, besides being about stories like this will consume an enormous amount of time. In my case, I have read everything I can find about the period of Bengali history covering the lifespan of this fellow. Only to come up empty handed. What is astounding, however, is that this story has been repeated across the descending families in Cornwall, the US and Australia. About a decade ago, someone in Cornwall even wrote an article declaring that my ancestor, who was baptized with the note “a black” in the Truro parish register, was most likely from Africa as Cornwall hosted a number of freed slaves. And thinking about that assertion even consumed energy.
Fast forward, and here is the positive side of the rabbit hole. I have found enough information to make me believe that Peter Truro (that’s his English name) was quite possibly from Bengal and that he was certainly, at the very least, shanghaied for sailor service, since he continued a career as a mariner. Furthermore, he married into a distinctly middle class family and lived in a small port town, I think that he would have had a hard time convincing people he was from Bengal if he wasn’t. And since the people he knew where not paupers themselves, he would have needed to construct some status (and have good enough manners to defend it). So what if he stretched the truth from being the son of a not so wealthy merchant or a clerk from the British office? Maybe he didn’t actually even make this construction but his grandchildren did in order to make it palatable in a world that seems to have been increasingly divided over race and economic status. The point is not to avoid the beloved family stories but to embrace them. At the very least they add three dimensions to the two dimensional world contained in the records. I would even say these rabbit holes are the point in the end.
The aristocratic pretensions rabbit hole – so many of us are hell bent on connecting to an aristocratic line. As my grandfather once said to me, “why are you doing this? Do you think there is money there?” Personally, I find the challenge in uncovering the untold stories, not in retelling the tales (embellished as they are) of the aristocratic class. So I find it infinitely more satisfying to prove that some poor sod had ten kids in a backwater village, then I do to start regurgitating lineages from the Domesday Book. But, I do know the thrill of suddenly getting back to William the Conqueror and before. And that is hard with my pauper families. The link to an aristocrat opens up a locked historical record and is about the only way to take a family back before the year 1600.
Once, I walked into the Cornish Family History Center and two elderly gentlemen came to assist me. “Can we help you they said?” I responded, that I had an interesting story I wanted to verify…and they almost threw me out on the spot. They later apologized and told me that every American and Australian that came in had an interesting story to verify and it was always about their link to some petty aristocrat with a manor and title. They hated fueling the fantasies of folks who wouldn’t know a manor house from a gated community. But I defend the momentum towards the aristocrats nonetheless. Without the link to an aristocrat, you are stuck. Really, it won’t make you feel any more important to discover that your 15th great grandfather held title to Bideford – no, it won’t. There is no inheritance, nobody will ask you to join the house of lords and most of the British (Keeping up Appearances, aside) may actually think you are a rube. Do it though. Look for those links and embrace the aristocratic rabbit holes. Because, once you really find it, your inheritance will be a deep connection with history and the challenge of finding out how your family fell so far and so fast. The Queen of Hearts will be proud of you.
There is one other type of rabbit hole. The one that you will dig yourself by starting broad and taking enormous leaps to push yourself further and further back into history. I have personally dug more rabbit holes than I would like to remember. I have been exhilarated to “have the story” only to find out days or years down the line that it doesn’t work. DON’T avoid these either. Ninety percent of proof is disproof. All the constructions you make are hostage to this logic. Genealogy doesn’t get you to the truth…it gets you to the best possibility. I read about a study that was done after World War II, that suggested about 30 percent of the population of the United States was not related to the father on their birth certificate. I don’t say this to be shocking. Humans are not as monogamous or above the table as we like to think of ourselves. The point is that if you think you are establishing the absolute truth here, you are sadly deluding yourself. If you learn to love all your family tree as rabbit hole of proportions, you will not be quite so willing to defend its wrong turns and more open to the logic of disproof that will actually contribute to the eventual depth and brilliance of the the whole thing. At least until Science brings it down again…. Which brings me to DNA.
DNA Testing
I actually don’t use this as a tool myself. I stand on the outside as a curious observer as my cousins in arms have joined the human DNA project with the idea of getting to the truth. And I am impressed that a test can often tell you, you are barking up the wrong tree. It can also direct you towards the one that is more genetically correct (and thus worthy of your time). So as I say it, DNA is a great tool for disproving rabbit holes. It also presents a new and wonderful set of tools for sending you off closer to the right direction. But it cannot substitute for tale telling enterprise of the family historian. It cannot give the content. I think we may think we are heading towards a promise that the human DNA may be imminently knowable, that we will all know the medium term answer to where we come from, that we will type in our names into a database and be told exactly who on the planet we relate to. Malarkey. First of all, the progression backwards is exponential. We do not need a database to tell us that we are so inextricably intermarried — because the number of direct ancestors we have after 500 years begins to surpass the actual population on the planet — that the best way to think of the human race IS as one big family. DNA can help us to understand that. It can be a solid tool in moving us closer to understanding family history – but it cannot give the particulars, tell the stories or follow the waves of history that are what we learn from the enterprise.