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Do you remember the defining moments when suddenly something clicked into place, or you learned something the hard way without reading about it or attending a class? I can count the following seven “aha” moments as some of my best learning experiences.
1. Don’t skip on collecting all relevant information. When I joined the Society of Genealogists and was given a birth brief to fill out, I still remember the sudden thought, 'Oh, so I should be collecting all the births, marriages and deaths of all my ancestors!' Such methodical collecting had simply not occurred to me. But give me a form to fill and I like to set to and fill it out. From then on I was doubly hooked and the tree really started to take solid shape, instead of being an odd collection of bits of information.
2. Names in later life are not always exactly the same as at birth (duh). Exactly how much time I wasted looking for Elizabeth Sutton only, I don’t want to confess. The name on the back of the photograph said Lizzie, surely she had to be Elizabeth? It was totally beside the point that my own mother only uses her middle name and never her first name. I was boxed in by my assumption. For a long time I thought this birth was unregistered, but it was there all the time under Susan Elizabeth Sutton.
3. Multiple marriage partners may have had the same first name. A man named John might marry a woman named Mary, then after Mary dies, he might marry another woman called Mary! This one causes a lot of confusion, but when you spot it, it makes you proud to be such a good detective. It is worthwhile collecting all the possible marriage details for your John, even after you think you have the one and only marriage for him. The clue is usually a gap in the children’s births, and maybe an anomalous age for Mary in the census. This lesson might also come under the heading buy all the civil registration certificates that you can afford.
4. Don’t rely on your parents or grandparents to have got the dates for their own parents and grandparents right. Invariably you need to widen the searches to include far further back than you have been given to believe. ‘She must have died in the 1950s’, means she died around 1932! I now understand more about how memory is a very inexact thing, and can lead to totally false bits of information. In fact, I no longer rely on any information given by relatives unless I can see the documents, or it involves their own birthday.
5. If you have a rare surname, collect everyone. This one occurred to me early on, when I first saw that it would be possible to collect all the known instances of a rare surname from various indexes and then analyse the results – AHA, now I might be able to put together all the missing bits in the tree. Of course, I started out by sticking to just one spelling, but I soon had that idea knocked out of me.
6. Helpful documents are sometimes available in printed collections and available from the library or on the bookshelves of the archives. It is not always necessary to call up an original document at the National Archives or the local record office, often there is a printed copy published by the local record society and they tend to be indexed. Not only that, but it prevents you having to struggle with difficult handwriting, so saves you time. I once spent a whole day on the original hearth tax returns for Wandsworth, without making a great deal of sense of them, before finding that in fact they were printed by the Surrey Record Society and all I had to do was look in the book, which just happened to be in a room quite close to where I ordered up the originals. It has been annoying me ever since.
7. Don’t set out for the record office without all your information and that includes double checking the parish, county and archdeaconry, and knowing the names, places and date ranges you are searching for. This one still happens to me, although I have got very much better than I used to be.
What are your best ‘aha’ moments? Do share them.
I totally agree, so much comes downs to assumptions. Getting better at genealogy is a fight against ourselves in so many ways. I like your 4 lessons very much!
1) Order that marriage certificate of your ancestor's second (or third) marriage to that person from whom you're not descended. More than once, I've belatedly realized that if my great-great-great-grandfather married again - and especially if he married again after civil registration was introduced - there will be valuable information, even if I'm not related to his wife! (Like, say, the name and occupation of his father? My great-great-great-great-grandfather? Duh!)
2) While it's true that a death certificate may have errors - the person in question not being alive to correct them - one can learn so much by checking and identifying who reported the death. For years, I resisted ordering death certificates, until the day I discovered that my great-great-grandmother's death was reported by her sister. I didn't know she had a sister. She had, in fact, six sisters.
3) One of the best things about a Google Map is the "walking option". I don't know about you, but very few of my ancestors had horses or carriages in the days before rail travel. It's a good idea to check how long it would have taken them to trudge from one village to another, particularly if you're looking for the likelihood of a) a marriage, b) a child who appears to have been born in a different place than his elder and younger siblings.
4) That said, it is important to remember Sherlock Holmes declaration: ". . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Now, this can be a perilous bit of advice for an inexperienced family historian, but I'm reasonably experienced and the number of times I have disregarded improbable evidence does me no credit. It postponed my discoveries that my husband's great-great-great-grandfather died off the coast of South Africa while being transported for forgery, and that my own great-great-great-great-grandmother married four times, her first and third husbands being two of my great-great-great-great-grandfathers! (In fact, my great-great-great-grandparents were step-siblings. Perfectly legal, as it turns out -- they even had a church wedding with banns.)
It all comes down to assumptions again, doesn't it?
I couldn’t agree more. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s always keep an open mind and try not to make assumptions or you could build your own brick walls. I once researched someone’s ancestor who owned a cotton mill. Through my research, I found that he’d had more humble beginnings, however, the one I was helping just couldn’t accept that this was his family, even though everything fitted (including the same address). I’ve had this happen twice and it’s so sad when people reject their ancestors just because they don’t fit their ideal.
One of my 2x great aunts married a solicitor and I was contacted from one of his descendants (from one of his mistresses). He wasn’t living at his home address with his first wife on the 1841 census, and I suggested that he was living 6 miles away with another mistress. She found that unbelievable and I had to produce more evidence to show that it was a real possibility. It was only after she accepted that this could indeed be her ancestor that we were able to move forward with the research and find out so much more about him! It also meant that after years of researching, his descendants in NZ finally found out who the real mother of their ancestor was! The brick walls just kept tumbling down.
Now I always try to keep an open mind and look at what the evidence is saying to me. It’s pointless rejecting it just because it doesn’t fit in with preconceived ideas.
That is a great one! How did you come to realize?
I would love to know whether this is something peculiar to the Athertons, or whether other one-namers have similar data. Are they mainly 1st cousins, or 2nd cousins, or less related? Is it because the Atherton name is very common in one particular area?