My Trails into the Past

If we do genealogy research long enough, we will get a tough problem we cannot solve that many call “brick walls.” These might be questions we cannot answer such as who a parent of an ancestor is, or wanting to know when an ancestor married or died. I have some strategies I use when I get tough problems. Often the answer is there but I have not looked in the right place. Let’s look at my tips, one by one. Review Previous Research My first strategy is to review all my previous research. I look at every document I have saved, whether digital or on paper. In fact, we sometimes forget about those older paper files we have. We might have written down a note about someone whom we could not place in the family at the time, but with time, we have more information and can now place them properly within the family. When reviewing the research, I review any handwritten notes I have made and that I have transcribed and extracted all the information pieces from every document. Sometimes just...

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...

It's  Saturday Night  -  time for more  Genealogy Fun!  Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing is to: 1) Determine which event in your ancestral history that you would love to be a witness to via a Time Machine.  Assume that you could observe the event, but not participate in it. 2) Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status post . Like Randy, I have many brick walls and I have written before about one of my biggest I’d like to solve. You can see here , along with more links to previous posts about my trials and tribulations. I would love to discover the birth parents of my 3X-great-grandfather, Samuel Johnston, who was born about 1816 in South Carolina. I am hoping that in the process, I would learn which county this happened in, so I can hope to continue the line further back. I have been stuck in Yalobusha County, Mississippi where the family appeared ...

This is my second year working on this year-long 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. I smiled when I saw "brick walls" as the theme for this week. This is going to be a difficult topic because I have many brick walls (as many of us do). I can just open up my RootsMagic database program and check out any line, and there will be a missing parent at the end. Some of my lines, I’d like to keep my research close to hand and not spill it out just yet, in case I wish to write articles about my findings, especially those that were difficult to solve with indirect or negative evidence. However there  are other lines that I can probably share and perhaps this blog post will help. Someone out there might have a clue to help me, or actually have the answer. The third great-grandfather o...