My Trails into the Past

We all have challenges in conducting genealogy research. Some of us may call them brick walls, those places in the family tree where we are stuck and cannot take our genealogy back another generation.  These challenges may be caused by several reasons: record loss due to a natural disaster or war access to the records not being allowed our lack of knowledge about what records are available not understanding the records we have already found To work through these challenges, I follow the following steps: Review prior research . This includes reviewing each document I have previously found and ensuring I have squeezed out every bit of information from them. While I’m doing this, questions will come to mind. Record those questions. Resist the urge to go right to researching. Create a timeline . As I review the documents I have, I create a timeline that includes the date of the event, the location, who else was present, and the source of the information. A timeline will show gaps in th...

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 have been working on this brick wall for many years. A blog post from 23 January 2014, sums up what I knew about the family. Since that post, I’ve collected tax and land records for Samuel in Yalobusha County, Mississippi. By figuring out who his neighbors were, I might discover where he was previously before Mississippi. His children were born in Alabama, but I have no idea yet which county. Here is the land mapped out for Samuel and his neighbors. He purchased his piece of land from Isaac Pearson/Person on 31 March 1856. [1] In the 1854 tax list, his neighbors were listed using the description of their land. [2] So what I’m doing now is creating a neighborhood to find families to resea...