Recently I have been searching diligently for my husband’s German ancestors and I’ve run into that age-old genealogy problem – how do I distinguish between two unrelated people who have the same name, similar ages and live near each other? Or two people from the same family with the same name?
Of the many techniques we have at our disposal for researching our ancestors, timelines can be among the most eye-opening and, yet, they are often forgotten – buried in an endless genealogy to-do list or put off for some future rainy day when we have more time.
Hindsight is always 20/20, don’t you think? It’s pretty easy to take a long look back and see the error of our ways. If we had that extraordinary vision, we might save ourselves countless hours of aimless research. Having worked on my own family tree or maybe “tangle of roots,” for over thirty years now, I have come to realize that my missteps may indeed be beneficial to others. In other words, “do as I say, not as I do.”
While just about all of us have used Ancestry.com at some point, very few have really uncovered everything they can from Ancestry’s massive databases. With so many records and resources it is incredibly easy for vital records to get buried. You might be surprised by how many brick walls are broken down and “missing” records located by utilizing a new set of advanced tips and search tricks.
One of the most common research mistakes that family historians make when building their tree (especially for the first time) is also one of the most limiting and potentially detrimental. We like to call it the Direct-Line Mistake, and its affect on your research is pretty huge.
Beating your head against a wall trying to find missing information about your mysterious ancestor? It’s time to get a fresh perspective and try some new tactics. Have you done everything on this list?
If you have been working on your family history for years and have never gone back over all of the documents you have accumulated, you are probably stalling your research progress. But, it’s never too late to blow off all the dust, open that squeaky file cabinet drawer and make sure you are getting all you can out of your records.
Searching for and locating records about our ancestors is seldom a simple process. Of course, we all have those easy to find individuals that seem to appear in every single record at just the right time — but many of us spend most of our time searching for those elusive members of our tree that appear to have avoided being recorded on purpose.
If you’ve hit a brick wall in your research, check our list of 13 common reasons why people fail to find the genealogy data they’re looking for. These are not the only reasons a person might hit a brick wall or miss information (some circumstances, like adoption, provide even greater challenges) but in the vast majority of cases one or more of these observations apply. If you feel that something on the list describes your research take the time to address it and you might find that you tear down your family history obstacle once and for all.
What if you could transform Cyndi’s List into an even more valuable online research tool than it already is? I’ll share a quick experiment that helped me do just that.
Thank you to Bob Vornlocker for this article on his German genealogy research. In the following article Bob has shared a personal story of breaking down a long-time brick wall and the process he used to create that “lucky break” …