Week 15: Brick Wall – Tools to Help Solve Tough Problems

We all have brick walls. Many are tough to solve because there are no records directly giving us the answer. Some we create ourselves because we don’t recognize clues of indirect evidence in documents that might help us.

I present on this topic to local genealogical societies and have two tips that might jumpstart a researcher who is stuck.

Review Your Previous Work
If we have been researching a long time, we may have research notes or documents we have collected a long time ago when we were just starting out that we have not looked at again. At the early stage, we tend collect every document with our family names on them and then put them aside when they don’t name our direct ancestor.

Review also all of your previous documents. We tend to get excited about a document that answers a particular question but do not pay as much attention to the other information listed on the document. Perhaps now, some of that information will make more sense.

An example of this: I had the date of my husband’s grandfather, Joseph Norman Gorrell’s death of 21 July 1960. He is buried at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Webb City, Jasper County, Missouri and I have a photo of the tombstone.[1] However, I couldn’t find his death certificate on the Missouri Digital Heritage website as I expected. This is a very complete database and there are images of certificates. The certificates for the year of 1960 are available, but there is none for him. How I solved this, was to review the obituary. When I read it more carefully, I discovered that he died in Pittsburg, as can be seen in the first paragraph of the obituary.[2]   

Pittsburg is a town in the southeastern corner of Kansas and Webb City is in the southwestern corner of Missouri. His daughter, Bertha, lived in Pittsburg. It is possible he had been visiting his daughter, became ill, and died in Kansas. His wife, Matilda, had died in 1958 and was already buried in Mount Hope Cemetery. I then ordered his death certificate from the Kansas State Board of Health.

Reorganize Your Research
Putting the data from your various records into a new format is often very useful. Put the facts together into a timeline and you might see gaps in your research. Have you obtained all of the census records or directories? Perhaps you see multiple events at the same time that could point to multiple people instead of one. Good ways to reorganize is to create:

• Timelines
• Tables    
• Lists
• Drawing or maps

Here is a table I created as I was trying to determine when John H. Sullivan and Ann Gleeson married. Both applied for homestead land in Davison County in Dakota Territory, Ann in October 1880 and John in April 1881. By putting all of the records from their homestead papers into chronological order, I could see how their records overlapped. In none of Ann’s papers, was she listed as married. John’s affidavit did mention he had a wife, who lived on the property, so perhaps they were married between 26 May 1881 and 15 Sept 1881. The catholic church in Mitchell does not have records in this time period, even though the church was founded in 1880.

5 Quick Tips

• Write about your problem
• Broaden your research to collateral relatives, neighbors, and associates.
• Keep research logs
• Ask someone to look at your problem
• Learn new search and analyzing techniques

I hope these tips will help with your research brick walls.

This is my fourth year working on this year-long 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.

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[1] Gorrell, Lisa, photographer, Headstone Inscription of Joseph Norman Gorrell, Mt. Hope Cemetery, Webb City, Missouri (Photographed July 1998). See also Find A Grave, database with images (http://www.findagrave.com), Memorial # 57951171, Joseph N. Gorrell, citing Mount Hope Cemetery, Webb City, Jasper Co, Missouri.

[2] “J. N. Gorrell,” Joplin (Missouri) Globe, 11 Jul 1960, clipping, p. unk.

Copyright © 2021 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.