How to Know If a Record Is About Your Ancestor - Genealogy Basics

[@redf7209]

In the UK it was common for large families to stay in the same area for a long time with many children being named after the siblings of their parents so the same first names would appear again and again. The choice of first name was fairly limited across the population it would seem. Each generation would commonly be having children at the same time as their own siblings so its not even uncommon for cousins with the exact same name to be baptised on the same day in the same church. A baptism is not a birthday, occasionally a baptism could take place years later or be done at the same time as a sibling, a parish register original record might often explain this in more detail against the record. Children would commonly die and a subsequent child would be given the same name. Some children might even be brought up with their cousins if something happens to their parents or the family tried to hide an illegitimate child with relatives. I've found the major obstacle to tree development is not failing to find an ancestor but working out which one is which. Often the only way is to eliminate the wrong choices by researching the whole family name in that area and understanding who was with who living where. It would also not be uncommon for families to live next to each other in the same street and children to be a bit mixed up by the census man. Its also quite possible for 2 sisters of one local family to 2 brothers in another local family. Attention to detail is important and a sense of the geography. You will get a sense of which names are really common and which are quite rare to judge the probabilities of a mistake when you browse a parish register over a lot of years rather than just looking at individual search engine results With the industrial revolution and railways families did start leaving the land to follow industry. So some become more distant from their roots but Americans may need to consider a small distance in the US can effectively be a large distance in the UK in those days. Certain trades did move around. Fishing communities moved with the seasons to follow the fish and their markets in a cycle, Shepherds and farmers drifted from farm to farm and labourers to new trades.

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

Wow. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge. I'm sad it took over a year for it to surface to my attention. Part of it that the amount of DNA comments we get on this channel is overwhelming. I hope you'll come back and share more comments on the research videos. I do so appreciate them.

[@WellsyBRNC]

Thank you, nice presentation! Cheers, Pamela

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

You're very welcome. Glad I can help. Keep in touch with other questions you may have.

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

Do you want to know how to go more in-depth in analyzing records? We have a video about that! Watch that here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/j6HVgISDo7lsfc0.

[@islaannisainsworth4443]

Great video. Just wish people would actually do this process!!! I have seen so many attachments in Family Search & Ancestry that just don't add up. Obvious dates & info aren't correct. Arggggh. I have made mistakes early on but have reversed them. Makes the process of research difficult.😵

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. So many folks make mistakes either from being naive or stubborn. However, I hope that this video, and others like it, can help educate those who want to improve.

[@rosannelytle6428]

Very well presented, thank you.

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

Thanks so much. Glad you enjoyed it. There are plenty more on our channel. Let us know if you have questions.

[@puncheex2]

One thing I've found out is that the indicies very often are incorrect or incomplete. Always go to the original document, if you can, to get the real data that the record holds. If you have a clue about what is on the record, that will often allow you to discern things that the indexer, coming on ths cold, miss. OTOH, he is probably looking at a clearer copy of the record than you are. Keep your options open until you have a story that hangs together.

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

Indices are not infallible, neither are the original record. A bad index is easier to handle than a record set without an index. So that's when research skills come into place. ABSOLUTELY go to the original record as often as you can. Not only can you see where the indexer may have gone awry. But, there are additional details and clues that could crack open a brick wall that wasn't included. CASE IN POINT... For years, I have only accessed the indices for the German Lutheran Church records from the 1750s. Ancestry made the German Lutheran Church record collection available (images of the original documents) last year. When I saw the actual record, the witnesses included additional family members that can take our family tree laterally and capture siblings, if it can't go back another generation!

[@puncheex2]

I agree. I record indicies when they are available and I copy digitized originals (I can't travel very much so all my work is done on the net, except among close relatives) when I can. Belt AND suspnders. Indeed the original record may have problems; people forget and sometimes fib, census takers cut corners, and so on.The point is that indexing the record will not result in more accuracy or more data than the original, and quite often the reverse.

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

I hear you about travel restrictions. Devon is a homeschooling mom of five (only one appears on FHF regularly). Andy has a full-time job as an engineer (that is until we can grow our genealogy education company). So online genealogy is where it's at for us 95% of the time.

[@redf7209]

@@FamilyHistoryFanaticsI have to agree on this but its not too frequent on the originals, the most prevalent problems are inaccurate transcribing, mispelling of names of people and places, and entries in the wrong place in the register, occasionally i think the individuals have misled about their age or birthplace as they contradict themselves on other records. On originals i have found newspaper records that show the best man as the groom, newspaper accounts of people changing surnames to meet codicils in wills, court cases about false militia lists to fraudulently collect the pay of people who never joined up, registers devised years after the fact based on the research of clergymen who's predecessor failed to keep the register, people claiming property so they can vote, I have seen church records comparing 'birth' names with 'baptism' names which are completely different. Trawling a full register does give you a better idea of what is going on and usually pays off.. - Oh and census of immigrants can be dodgy due to language issues. Today English is thought to be a fairly understandable language from a lot of areas but in those days a local accent might be very different from english with a heavy touch of irish or gaelic and mishearig was very easy.

[@kcmozart]

This becomes epically harder when you are researching in Europe (Germany to be specific) pre 1800s, the internal and external boarders changed frequently do to war. Also, Not all records include complete names. For example Johann Joachim Heinrich Jacob Paul Bredow, has a son with the same name. He can be listed with all of his names, only the first name, only the first two names, or even as Paul Bredow. The last one is more likely once he has immigrated to the US. All of the tips you have suggested are great! especially combination of location and other family members. I have also found the further back you go the amount of information recorded by the church/pastors for baptisms, marriages, and deaths very widely, and in most cases seem to trail off prior to about 1700. I have gotten back as far as 1539 with one branch but I think that is because there was wealth and power which meant they could read and write therefore these things were documented. Another thing that makes things hard is that death was a part of daily life and many of my family's ancestors were married multiple times just to survive life. Husbands because they needed help with their many children and someone to cook and clean, and wives who needed a man to take care of them and their children because they couldn't work, vote, etc. While the detective work or "the chase" is fun, I find the most exciting thing is to find out specific things about past relatives. Finding out you are descendants of royalty, or that they fought in the civil or revolutionary wars is always cool, but I am also just as excited to find out they were an actress, a sea captain, part of the Lutheran reformation in Germany, or that my mother's great grandfather fell over the railing on the ship taking him to America and that someone caught him by his suspenders to keep him from going overboard. Without that non-family member my mother would have never existed.

[@kcmozart]

Me too. I just saw some hints today on Ancestry where, on closer inspection, you discover the child was 61 years old before the parents were born. I also saw today someone who's date of death was over 200 years past their date of birth. I think most people just start clicking and adding without really looking carefully. In regards to not being told before you believe it.... I am talking about things for pre 1799.

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

So much in this comment to unpack but I LOVE that you shared them. I'll start with the last first... I too focus on the cool facts about each person rather than one person who has one cool fact. The stories and the quest for them keep me coming back for more. I loved the points you brought up on the multiple marriages due to survival after the death of a spouse. That's what happened to my German Immigrants on my maiden name line. The husband died leaving my 3rd great-grandmother with three children under the age of four. She quickly remarried to survive. The children were often confused, at least on paper, as the children of the step-father's name. But eventually, all knew they were Geiszlers. Those German border changes are difficult, especially since the country as we know it today wasn't a unified country, as I'm sure you're aware, until the late 1800s. But we do the best we can and hope we make the case based on what we've discovered. Thanks for all of these wonderful commentary to read. Made my day.

[@brittanyhayes1043]

Lol from 1:15 to 1:19 is exactly what I did and I was correct for most of them. Especially when finding out one of my second great granduncles murdered somebody the same way my ancestor killed someone over corn nine years apart. 😭

[@grantmcduling9760]

Nice presentation and great information and tips. But from where I research from (Australia) having paid memberships of the main genealogy platforms is prohibitively expensive and makes researching as you portray not very relevant (although I fully agree with your approach etc).

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

I'm also a frugal genealogist. I will often budget my dollars to explore one website each year with a subscription. It really helps me save a lot of money. Another thing I do to save money is to request memberships for gifts. I don't need more things, so I ask for subscriptions. Finally, FamilySearch is always free. That's helpful. Climbing our family tree can be costly, but there are ways to manage our dollars (or AU$) to get maximum results.

[@Bn9776]

Where can I upload my raw data ? Like what are some reliable websites?

[@FamilyHistoryFanatics]

GEDmatch.com promethease.com dna.land dnagedcom.com

[@Bn9776]

Thank you so much