Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night again -
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to:
1) Sometimes an ancestor or relative just disappears from the records, and we cannot find another record after a certain date.
2) Tell us about one or more of your relatives or ancestors who have disappeared and have not been found since a certain date. Do you have any idea of what might have happened to them?
Here's mine:
First, I can share a blog post I wrote for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks two weeks ago about an ancestor who disappeared: WhatBecame of Robert Hutson of Cherokee County, Georgia?
I wondered how I could locate all the people in my database who have no death fact. I have RootsMagic 10 now and used the search feature, focusing on an event that has a blank death date. I got 4839 matches out of 7462 people. That is not a great statistic! Many of the hits are people who have no surname, mostly women. Another bunch of people are those who are still alive.
I reran it, this time, eliminating those people born after 1930. That brought the number down to 1869. That is still a lot. Glancing through some of the names, most are collateral lines. Next, I added the ancestors of my daughter, which brought up only the people who are color-coded, for a total of 34.
This would be a good project to work on, to at least fill in an “after” date.
I bet if you just focused only on the people who were born in the 1800's in the United States, you could find death dates for all of them.
ReplyDeleteThat would be a good start, for sure.
DeleteI'm not surprised that you had 4800+ people with no death date. When we add collaterals, especially with people who lived in the 20th century and might still be living, I am sure my numbers would be way up there, too. Finding death dates would be a great project!
ReplyDeleteYeah something to do when I have so specific project to work on.
Delete