Pitfalls of Family Research (1 Viewer)

I've been posting less here for the last several days. One of my cousins corralled me at our last family reunion and asked if I would try to research our family tree. I was going to get around to this anyway, but her request just made it happen sooner.

My wife likes to look at some family-oriented shows on TV including one called "Long Lost Family" about people who were adopted or otherwise separated from their family as an infant or really young child. They wanted to try to find any surviving family members. The two researchers on the show say they use the Ancestry.COM site, so I bit the bullet and joined up.

It is ADDICTIVE.

Not only that, the guys & gals who developed this software at Ancestry.COM really knew what they were doing. The results start piling in once you get enough information for their search software to start finding matching data.

I have taken my family tree through the patrilneal sequence back the the USA Virginia colony from 1650. I have also traced my wife's family back to the late 1690s and early 1700s in Nova Scotia at/around the time (and proper location) for the original displacement of French settlers from the Arcadia region to small settlements in south Louisiana before it became a formal territory (in 1803) - which means her family goes back to the original Cajuns.

The only part that gets tricky is that as the records get older (and more rural in origin), you will see the same name with several different contradictory facts about them. The software presents those as different people. You have to then go back and try to figure out which is the best record and then consolidate the records based on your best guess.

The part that REALLY gets crazy is that some U.S. censuses are based on using a hand-written ledger book in old script written by folks whose handwriting is often impossible to read with certainty.

At the moment, I'm busy reconciling different reports. Based on finding many cases with the same (or similar) names but differently enough spelled to not automatically match, I end up with what appears to be a family who had as many as 26 children. Then I have to sort through the records to see if I can figure out which records to combine.

I am working on census records going back as far as 1790 (the FIRST USA census). The printed censuses didn't start until then 1950s so that's 160 years worth of data that requires both good eyesight and patience. At my age, I find that my less than perfect eyesight leads to diminution of my level of patience, so I have to take a break now and then.

Someone with a wry sense of humor once advised me, "Know thyself. It's the ultimate form of torture." Now I understand what he meant.

Good luck my friend, that is one rabbit-hole I will NEVER go down into!

The_Doc_Man said:

The part that REALLY gets crazy is that some U.S. censuses are based on using a hand-written ledger book in old script written by folks whose handwriting is often impossible to read with certainty.

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Not just the handwriting.

We had one where an "Ann Steiner" seemed to come out of nowhere as the deceased's mother's name on a death certificate.

Turned out the mother's name was "Ernestina" followed by a Polish surname. I imagine when said with a heavy accent, the registrar had heard enough at the end of the first name.

Which reminds me of the old joke about the guy doing a census. He comes to Aaron Schwartz's Chinese Tailor Shop. Inside is the very Chinese-appearing proprietor with the name tag, Aaron Schwartz.

The census-taker apologizes and asks him, "Excuse me, sir, but your name and your appearance just don't seem to match. Is that your real name?"

The proprietor says, in a thick but understandable Chinese accent, "It is the name on my entry papers from when I came to your country. But it is not my real name."

The census-taker asks, "Then, if you don't mind telling me, how did you get this name?"

The proprietor replies, "I came into the country at Ellis Island. The man ahead of me in line was asked, 'What is your name?' and he answered 'Aaron Schwartz.' Then it was my turn. The man at the desk asked me my name and I answered 'Sam Ting.'"

For anybody who watches the TV series Vikings, my wife can genuinely trace herself back to Rollo Rolf, that is going all the way back to 860

Some of my family members have traced our family line back to just before the Revolutionary War where my ancestor came from Ireland (gets a little fuzzy before that). We have had a few notable ancestors (fourth governor of Indiana) and a mathematician who created math books for one room school houses (call Ray' arithmetic), I have a copy of one of the books myself (not worth much).

I had a cousin who was State Director of Corrections for Louisiana during the first two terms of Governor Edwards. Supposedly we have minor nobility in the family tree. I also know of one case where except for executive clemency, we would have had a family member whose tree had one arm and a dangling rope.

Gotta watch out when you go digging. Might find buried treasure. Might find buried bodies.

My paternal family line was farmers in England, came here first to become explorers, then career military for a while, then farmers around the end of the 18th century. Grandfather was a soldier in WW2 (was in in the Aleutian Islands campaign while serving with the Corps of Engineers, of all things), and my father did a bunch of things (along with becoming a cautionary tale about the dangers of trust).

Interestingly, my paternal grandmother is descended from a distaff branch of the House of Stuart. And my dad always claimed that Abraham Lincoln was something like a 7th cousin, but most of America can probably claim that by now (also, he had no proof, and we all know how reliable family tales tend to be....)

Can't tell you about my mother's side of the family - she got disowned for both marrying a non-Catholic and marrying a civilian (even if he WAS a cop), and I don't think my grandfather spoke more than a dozen words to me in his life.

Like many Australians, my ancestors come from a few different countries. My father's parents were English from east of London with my mother's ancestors from Lincoln, Scotland (Ayr), Denmark (Haderslev) and Poland.

We had a lot of good information from my maternal grandmother. The Scott side named the first children for their ancestors including the surnames as middle names. We even got back past a John Smith with this information. Still in contact with fifth cousins I met through research. We employed a Danish researcher who gave us a lot of detailed information from church records.

We knew almost nothing of my father's family and what we found was quite a surprise. His father's older siblings and parents were stage actors of considerable note in the late 19th and early 20th century. They travelled throughout the British Empire in a company that staged plays and comedic operas. One of the daughters became quite famous in India where she eventually died.

We found all this after connecting with another part of the family that settled in Canada. My grandfather had never mentioned any of it. Now we read about the family and the shows they performed in old digitised newspapers online.

kevlray said:

Some of my family members have traced our family line back to just before the Revolutionary War where my ancestor came from Ireland (gets a little fuzzy before that). We have had a few notable ancestors (fourth governor of Indiana) and a mathematician who created math books for one room school houses (call Ray' arithmetic), I have a copy of one of the books myself (not worth much).

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I forgot to mention that my governor ancestor got involved in some scandals.

Recently my brother had his DNA tested and it was quite different from the recent geographic distributions of our ancestors.

The big surprise was the almost half Scandinavian origins. Our Danish great great grandfather would only account for a one sixteenth. I expect a fair bit of it is from the Lincoln and Norfolk branches on our mother's paternal side but that still leaves a substantial proportion unaccounted.

Very little from Great Britain at all but a fair bit of Irish. The Scott side were Campbells from Ayr so in fact originally of Irish origin. About twelve percent Iberian. The few percent of other Western European genes can be attributed almost entirely to my Polish great great grandmother.

Quite fascinating really.

I've gotten back as far as a Captain in the British Army who was born in Sussex in 1599, but his child was born in the colonies. Since I did not buy the international option, that branch stops me. I might renew with the international option when the time comes, but for now I just want to clean up the conflicting records and get a picture of my USA tree (and wife's tree.)

When I told my mother-in-law about her family that goes all the way back to Acadia, Nova Scotia, she cried. But then, at 91, she does sometimes get emotional for reasons we cannot fathom. Still, to learn that she was a member of one of the oldest families in south Louisiana (in this case, the Martin family descended from the Doiron family) gave her a thrill. When she calmed down she was able to corroborate some of the findings she remembered from stories told about her family a couple of generations back.

From what I've learned, I have a bone to pick with my 6th-great grandfather. That son of a gun fought in the Revolutionary War with the Virginia Militia. As a result of fighting, he got a land grant. With all that land, did I inherit a DIME from him? Not even one little PENNY. The NERVE of some folks!

So, I'm a bit late to this party.

I've thought about following that back before but I haven't ever bitten the bullet. You think the Ancestry.com gig is worth the price then?

I have a cousin that has followed my mother's side of the family back a little way, but no one has done my dad's side that I know of. I would like to check into it.

Cindy, whether it is worth it depends on how much you want it. After all, value is relative to both the seller AND the buyer.

I would never say that site X is better than site Y on something like this, but I have to say that I have had good luck in dealing with Ancestry.COM and their fee is $99 for six months if you stay in USA-only records, except that the foreign-born parents will show up for the first person born in the states (or the colonies).

For instance, I found a Captain in the British Army who was born in Sussex, England in 1599 and his son was born in the Virginia Colony in about 1625 or so. In my wife's family, the person named Doiron had a parent from Acadia, Nova Scotia and the child was born in St. Martinville in south Louisiana. I have tried to trace back others but have had some trouble because of really poor record-keeping in some districts. In many cases, all you have is church birth, marriage, baptism, and death records. However, some places kept more detailed records. So it is a toss-up.

If you want to dive into the pool, all I can say is that I'm not disappointed with what I've been able to get from the Ancestry.COM site. But only you can decide whether it is worth it for you.

I've avoided this thread for a while, but I'm working really deep into this to try to make something I can share with my cousins. It is getting crazy now.

The problem of course is that to use the site you must be a member and that is not what they asked me to do. I'm working on the problems associated with downloading a file in GEDCOM format. In essence (at least as I see it) there are three major parts in the database - persons, families, and data sources/repositories. But to download it, they have to turn it into a flat file. Then it is up to schmucks like me to re-project the flattened file into some kind of useful structure so I can do family trees and (people) relationship diagrams and such.

When I started to examine what it would take to print this out, I realized I had data for over 700 people. Even at one person per page, that's more than one ink cartridge and more than one pack of printer paper. Not to mention that my little one-lung printer would probably not be too happy doing it. So when I get the report done, I'll see about exporting it to a PDF and tell them to get a cheap USB drive. PDF readers are built in for many systems but are usually free to download anyway.

The REAL fun this week is to make passes through the file to extract the stuff that I want to be printed, omitting stuff that is interesting online but not worth quite so much interest in a report that rivals municipal phone books. And getting relationship diagrams set up ... I'm dreading that.

My cousins had several copies (one for each member of my family, there are 12 of them) of our dad's family history. It probably is a couple hundred pages long (do not remember if it was double sided). I suspect they went to Office Depot or Staples and had them print it out (I have no idea on how much it cost).

You could also check with a local library, they tend to have cheap printing, though they may frown at the number of pages.

And the wheel turns for another iteration...

I have been laying back a bit on posting because of my time being consumed by this ancestry project. The cousins who talked me into this are going to get a LOT more than they ever bargained for.

I've reached the point where I need to create sub-set listings. By that I mean that my cousins in my mother's side of the family don't need to know everything about my cousins from my father's side of the family, so I'm working on an inclusion/exclusion feature. I'll pick a person and then say "include everyone who is an ancestor, sibling, or child of this person and include the spouse - but none of the spouses parents or sibs."

I've always been adventuresome in my programming excursions anyway, so I'm taking the approach of writing a recursive routine. Yes, if you assure that you use either ByVal parameters or local variables for everything, you can do that.

So of course the moment I did that, I found a new way to blow out the program stack. I've put in all sorts of features to prevent re-visitation of the same person by having a marker that says "Been there, done that." But I have a log that tells me when the code is at a particular depth of recursion. I think the last time it died was somewhere around 4200 (or so) depth of nesting. I also built some in-memory arrays of structures so that the visitation would be faster than having to traipse through recordsets.

I'm not actually asking for help on this, but if anyone needs to talk about recursive code, I've been "refreshing" myself on the topic. More than I care to consider, perhaps.

You've certainly gone far further back than I've done with my own family.

The family tree for my mother's name (Glenister) has been traced back to 1573 with over 8000 individual entries by an enthusiast with that surname.
If interested have a look at this link http://www.glenister.org/main/index.asp

I doubt I'll go back that far. My family research stops at the point when a person entered the states - or as is sometimes the case, the colonies. I didn't get the international version so I can only go back as far as someone who was born elsewhere but died on USA or American colony soil. So far, the oldest is 1599 for the patrilineal path. I've got about 950 or so people so far.

I'm also building in some "smarts" to detect impossibilities so that I can go back and try to correct tangles. It is, how shall I say it? A rather "interesting" bit of research.