The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (34 page)

Although Joseph Weaver's family were all in Maury County, Tennessee — which is where all his descendants thought he was as well — I could not find him on any tax roll there between 1815 and 1830. Wouldn't you like to know how to live in a county for fifteen years and never pay any taxes? Well, Joseph Weaver hadn't figured it out either. He was simply not in Tennessee; he was living in Pike County, Georgia.

Another popular excuse may be given when a researcher identifies a man believed to be an ancestor, but then finds a dower release showing that he was married to a different wife than expected. The genealogist then decides, “The first wife must have died, and he remarried.” Don't be too quick to “knock off” a wife. There are several other possible explanations. You may not have the correct man, but rather one with the same name; or the wife may have used a middle or nickname; or perhaps a divorce, not a death, occurred. One family assumed that when a wife married her second husband, her first husband, John Smathers, had died. The story had even progressed to the point where they believed that John had been killed in a hunting accident. Court records eventually revealed that the remarried woman had actually divorced John, who also had remarried and was living in Texas with his new wife and three children.

Consider the case of a will that doesn't name someone firmly believed by all descendants to be the decedent's child. The rationalizing researcher's argument? “He must have been mad at her, so he cut her off without a dime.” Hannah Strain, supposedly the eldest daughter of Samuel Strain of Highland County, Ohio, married James P. Finley. According to a long-held family tradition, the reason that Hannah did not appear in Samuel Strain's will (although he named his other twenty-one children) was that she was cut out by her staunch Presbyterian father because he disapproved of her marriage to a Methodist. Onomastic evidence and chronology seemed to support the belief that she was Samuel's daughter. We know that fathers often omitted older children from wills if they had already received an advance on their inheritance. The problem in this case was that there was another man in the community, unrelated to Samuel Strain, who also could have been Hannah's father. Thomas Strain had been ignored by genealogists because he was much more difficult to track, but further research showed that he was indeed Hannah's father. She had not been named in Samuel Strain's will because she wasn't Samuel's child. Researchers had formed an excuse and kept her in the wrong family for nearly a hundred years.

When records conflict, creating a “good reason” for the discrepancy is easier than reviewing the inconsistencies and digging into the records for more details that might reveal the truth. It's also hard to admit that the theory you've believed for years might be wrong. If you keep an open mind and continue to evaluate those conflicting records, you can probably resolve the incongruity in some other logical way.

Mistake 4:
Find a desirable ancestor in the colonial period, and then try to link up with him.

When the idea is phrased this way, most people would agree that it sounds ridiculous.
One of the first rules of genealogical research is to always move from the known to the unknown;
yet many researchers violate that rule. They try to link themselves to a famous historical figure; to an accepted, proven pedigree; to a published genealogy; or to a person from an earlier time period who had the same name and was living in the same community where they think their ancestor should have been. These are particularly tempting methods for researchers who do not have easy access to records in the area where their family lived. People who take the easy way, however, usually have as much success as the drunk who looked for his lost coin under the lamppost where the light was better, instead of in the dark street where he dropped it.

How many times have you heard a genealogist say something like this: “Our ancestors came from England to Braintree, Massachusetts, about 1650. The only thing I have to do now is link them to my family in Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1833”? Or, how many of you have found a man of the same name as your ancestor — say, a fairly unusual name like Miles Cary — living in a location where you think your ancestor once resided, and then you tried to link them together even though one was recorded there in 1776 and the other in 1830. Haven't you done that? Be honest. I certainly have!

When I began my research, I found that Abraham Newcomer was a very unusual name in Warrensburg, Johnson County, Missouri. I tracked him back to 1850 in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, without much difficulty. The family Bible said that Abraham Newcomer had married Mary Musselman in 1812 Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There was an
Abram
Newcomer listed in Lancaster County in the 1810 census. Do you think that I ignored that and continued to work in Cumberland County, studying the Abraham Newcomer that I knew to be the right man, getting to know him by reconstructing his family and his associates? No way. I wanted to move backwards. I wanted to find the immigrant! So I immediately jumped to Lancaster County and started copying records that contained men named Newcomer. It seemed, however, that there were people named Newcomer by the thousands. There were at least five Abraham Newcomers living in Pennsylvania between 1750 and 1800 — not to mention eighteen Newcomers named John and fourteen named Christian. After searching for twenty years, I still have not identified the father of Abraham Newcomer of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.

Nothing will waste your time more than forgetting the crucial lesson of moving from the known to the unknown. For every success you have linking one name to another by working both ends of the chain, you will probably have ten failures.

Mistake 5:
To avoid confusion, study only one piece of data at a time.

Too often we study documents as if they had no relationship to the people who created them. Don't put your documents in boxes — connect them, correlate them, look at other records that were produced at the same time, and analyze them in context. These records were produced by real people for specific reasons. Think about what those reasons were. Are they consistent with other things that your ancestor did? For instance, would a man who was shown on the tax roll as owning one cow and no other property in 1815 write a will the following year in which he bequeathed three horses, four cows, and 160 acres of real property? Compare documents and correlate the information.

The following case is an effort to identify and distinguish four men named John Franklin, all of whom lived in south-central Kentucky around 1800. The following tax listings come from a microfilmed copy of the Barren County, Kentucky, tax rolls, available through the Kentucky Historical Society. In 1807 John Franklin Sr. paid taxes on 150 acres on Beaver Creek, where he had lived since 1799.

In 1808 there were three men named John Franklin on the tax roll, but no John Franklin Sr. What had happened to him?

None of the above named men were designated by
Sr
., although one man was using the designation of
Jr
. Who, if any, of those listed on the tax roll was the man for whom I was searching?

Perhaps John Franklin Sr. had died. If so, there should be probate records for a man with that much real and personal property, but I could find no probate and no sale for the 150 acres on Beaver Creek. Maybe John Franklin Sr. was the man who didn't pay a poll because he was overage. If that were the case, why did he sell all of his personal and real property?

He could have moved away, but he didn't. I could find no record that John Franklin had sold the land on Beaver Creek, nor that he had bought the land on Barren's Creek. The man living on Barren's Creek had almost the same personal property as the man who had lived on Beaver Creek — which tells us that we should keep looking at the records in this community. How can we determine how John Franklin acquired that land if we can't find a sale? Is there anything else on this tax roll that might give us a clue where to look next? A man by the name of I. Lowe entered that piece of property on Barren's Creek. Isaac Lowe left a will. In it, he said:

By correlating two clues from the tax roll with one from what appeared to be an unrelated record, we have solved the problem. John Franklin Sr. was still in Barren County, now living on Barren's Creek.

Don't confine your research by studying only one document at a time; if you do, you won't be able to reconcile conflicting data.

Some researchers believed that Rev. Elijah Williams of Polk County, Missouri, was the son of another Elijah Williams who lived in adjoining Dallas County. However, the records that the two men generated during their lifetimes point away from such a connection rather than toward it.

Even if the chronology didn't prove that the two men couldn't be father and son, their behavior did. I don't think most sons — particularly one who was a Christian minister — would callously ignore the economic troubles of their father and half-siblings. Although their names would suggest a relationship, their recorded behavior does not.

Mistake 6:
Keep looking for those “magic” documents.

Genealogists love to tell about all the wonderful cases we have solved, and all the marvelous discoveries made possible by our brilliant research. If you listen to too many genealogy experts, you may begin to believe that we have these little magical document boxes. If we ever encounter a problem that we cannot solve, we simply leave the magic boxes at the archives, and they fill themselves with long-lost, detailed documents while we sleep.

Some families are able to locate magically detailed documents, such as land partitions that name all the heirs, or wills that identify specific relationships. For other families, however, such documents don't seem to exist. I have heard a genealogist say, “I have researched this family for years, and I just know Absalom's father is Meshach, but I can't find the proof.” That tells me that she probably is searching for a magic document. If indeed she has studied Absalom for years, reading every document that he produced; if she has studied his children, siblings, nephews, and nieces, and all the records they produced; and if she then thoroughly investigated Meshach, studying all the documents that he and his associates produced, this genealogist should be able to put together a beautiful argument for her case, producing circumstantial evidence for the relationship, and showing how the two men fit together. Even if those records do not provide “proof,” they will show whether or not the two men were linked during their lives. I fear, however, that most genealogists merely skim all those records produced by Absalom, his children, brothers, and sisters, and then they skim the records produced by Meshach, looking only for that magical phrase, “my son.” When they don't find it, they give up because they lack “proof.”

The most effective strategy is not to keep looking for a magic document, but to gather as much information as possible. Carefully examine each record you find, correlate the data with that of other records, and look for circumstantial evidence that will establish relationships among them.
For an example of this type of search, see my “Problematic Parents and Potential Offspring: The Example of Nathan Brown,” published in the June 1991 issue of the
National Genealogical Society Quarterly
. This article, which describes my fruitless search for records that would conclusively prove a connection between the immigrant Nathan Brown and his children, will give you an idea of how to proceed in similar circumstances. I never found the magic document. But the case is so strong that no one but Nathan could possibly have been the father of those children.

Mistake 7:
Hopscotch across decades.

Because the census is so readily available, it is easy to make the mistake of just going from one decade to the next, searching for one nuclear family. When that family cannot be located in the expected census or index, or there are too many people of the same name to be able to distinguish them, the researcher hits a brick wall.