Using data from U.S. Censuses

WARNING:  this blog entry discusses information that can be gotten by examining U.S. Census records.  As I do this, I will use the terminology that was used when the various censuses were taken and that terminology is sometimes not "politically correct" in 2015.

From the death certificate of my great, great grandmother, Adeline Amanda (Holderman) Prickett, we can get the names of her parents as provided by the informant:

According to J.A. Prickett (Joel Andrew Prickett -- Adeline's son), the parents of "Addeline Amanday Prickett" were Jacob Holderman who was born in Germany and Caroline Loveland who was born in Ohio.  From the death certificate you can see that Joel was at least a bit tentative about some of the information he was providing.  For example, from other sources I know that her name was Adeline Amanda instead of Addeline Amanday.  And the fact that the mother's name is hand written rather than typed suggests that it might have been added at a different time than the typed information.

I knew that Jane Ellen Prickett, my great grandmother and the daughter of Adeline, was born in Illinois (we saw that from her marriage certificate in another blog entry).  But I didn't understand the connection with Ohio and Germany at all.

Article 1, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution says "Representatives...shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective Numbers ....The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years."  In other words, in order to determine the number of representatives in Congress, the government would count the number of people in each state within three years of the adoption of the Constitution and every ten years thereafter.  The Constitution was adopted on 17 September 1787 and the first Federal Census was conducted in 1790.  Every tenth year after 1790 another census was taken and representatives to Congress were reallocated.  So the first census was in 1790, the second was in 1800, the third in 1810 and so on with the twenty-third census being taken in 2010.  And to the benefit of American genealogists, almost all of these census records have been saved in the National Archives.

Initially the information collected by census takers was specifically aimed at the constitutional requirement.  So the 1790 census tallied the number of free white males age 16 years and older, the number of free white males younger than age 16, the number of free white females, the number of other free people, and the number of slaves.  When you look at the 1790 census you see a list of the head of each family and then the tally of people in these various categories.  This tally methodology continued through the 1840 census albeit with slightly different age groups.

But beginning in 1850, the actual name of each person in the family was recorded along with some demographic information about that person!  So the 1850 census included the following information for each person:

1. Name
2. Address
3. Age
4. Sex
5. Color
6. Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane or idiotic
7. Value of real estate owned
8. Profession, occupation or trade of each male over 15 years of age
9. Place of birth
10. Whether married within the year
11. Whether attended school within the year
12. Whether unable to read and write
13. Whether a pauper or convict

For a complete list of the type of information collected in each census, see the Wikipedia entry on the United States Census.

To protect the privacy of the individuals enumerated in the census, U.S. law requires that the information collected in a census be confidential until 72 years after the census was taken.  For example, the census taken in 1900 was not publicly available until 1972.  The census taken in 2010 will be publicly available in 2082.  And the most recent census that was made public was the census taken in 1940 which became public in 2012.  The idea is that it is usually not possible to find information in publicly available censuses about people who are still living.

Well this is wonderful!  Since my great, great grandmother was born in 1835 (per her death certificate), she would be 15 years old in 1850 (the first census in which I would expected to see her name).  Now all I have to do is go to the census and find her entry so that I can get information about her family!  But wait...there's still a problem.  According to the 1850 census there were 23,191,876 people enumerated in the United States.  And guess what?  Since the government's focus was tallying people, they did not attempt to provide an index to the names of people named in the census.  I would have to go to the National Archives in Washington and work my way through volume after volume of 1850 census data hoping to find Adeline Amanda Holderman.  I have a strong suspicion that Adeline was living in Illinois in 1850 (because Jane Ellen, Adeline's daughter, was born in Illinois in 1854), so I could begin my census search with the state of Illinois.  But even so, Illinois had 851,470 people in the 1850 census and the task is still not easy.  I don't really want to spend the rest of my lifetime just reading census information from 1850 in some back office in Washington!

Fortunately there have been various projects over the years that can help me.  First of all, when the National Archives releases a census, they microfilm it and then distribute microfilm copies of the census to regional branches of the National Archives.  Regional branches are located in the following cities:

1. Atlanta, Georgia
2. Boston, Massachusetts
3. Chicago, Illinois
4. Denver, Colorado
5. Fort Worth, Texas
6. Kansas City, Missouri
7. New York City, New York
8. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
9. Riverside, California
10. San Bruno, California
11. Seattle, Washington

Since I live in the Atlanta area, there is a branch near me.  On a side note, even if you access census information in a more modern way on line, it is still interesting and useful to visit your nearest branch of the National Archives.  Frequently each branch is the repository for information that is specific to that particular geographical area.  So, for example, the Boston branch has original archival records for large parts of the colonial period in New England.  The Atlanta branch has original records for events that happened in the south east, and so on.  Here is the Wikipedia entry with much more information on the National Archives.

Many of the larger public libraries also purchase Federal Census microfilms...at least for the area they serve.  Check with your local library and you might be surprised at the extent of the resources they have available for genealogists.

Okay, so let's assume that I've figured out a way to get access to the census records without having to travel to Washington.  I still have the needle-in-a-haystack problem of finding my great, great grandmother among 851,470 people.

In the 1930s when FDR's administration implemented the Social Security Act, people needed to be able to prove their age.  In another blog entry, I already described "delayed birth certificates" that were used for this purpose.  But if you couldn't find anyone who could swear to the date of your birth, you had a problem...until someone realized that all of the affected people were most likely enumerated in Federal censuses.  So one of the work projects that FDR had was to use a system called Soundex to index the 1880 census.  I could spend an entire blog entry talking about Soundex, but instead I'll refer you to Wikipedia once again.  By indexing the 1880 census, people who might be turning 65 in the 1930s could prove their age by finding themselves in the 1880 census.  If you were 11 years old in 1880, then you should be 65 years old in 1934.  Even after Social Security's need for the 1880 index was gone, the Soundex index survived.  And in the 1980s when I began intensive genealogical research, this was the key to finding people in 1880.  However only a few censuses were Soundexed, so the process of finding your ancestor was still hit and miss.

A Utah company called Accelerated Indexing Systems (AIS) took up the challenge and indexed a lot of the early censuses including the all important 1850 census where every individual was named.  Almost always, any library or branch of the National Archives that had census microfilms would also have all or almost all of the AIS indices for those censuses.

If all else failed, and you knew the city or county where your ancestor lived, you could manually search the microfilm for that geographical area and sometimes find your ancestor.  This is a slow and tedious process, but it does work and I've done this many times.

Now jump ahead to today's world and this clever device called a computer.  At this point in time (2015) ALL of the census records that are public are available on web sites where you can simply enter the name of the person along with as much other information as you know and voila!  The computer will list people who match the information you have entered!  Ancestry.com is probably the gold standard for this type of capability, but this is a paid service.  But FamilySearch.org, run by the Mormon Church, is very good and it is free!

Using any of the above methods for finding her, a search for Adeline Amanda Holderman born in 1835 in Ohio in the 1850 Federal Census led me to this census page:

Adaline is listed on line 9 as a 15 year old girl who was born in Ohio in the family of Jacob Holderman and Mercy C. Holderman.  Jacob is 42 years old so he was born in 1808 in Ohio.  Mercy C. Holderman is 38 years old so she was born in 1812 in Ohio.  By looking at the ages and birthplaces of the remaining children we can infer how this family moved over the years.  The first eight children were all born in Ohio, but the ninth child was born in Illinois.  The eighth child is 5 years old and the ninth child is 3 years old.  Since this census was taken in 1850, the conclusion is that sometime between 1845 and 1847 the family moved from Ohio to Illinois.  One other thing pops out of this census record.  The family was enumerated in Knox County, Illinois, which is almost all the way to Iowa.  That is quite some distance from Grundy County, Illinois, where I would have expected to find them.  Jacob is enumerated as a farmer, but what were they doing in Knox County?

The mystery continues!

Information available on marriage certificates

From his death certificate, we learn that my grandfather Miller was born on 20 September 1888 in Coal City, Illinois and that he was the child of Charles E. Miller and Ellen Prickett:

From this we can infer that Charles E. Miller and Ellen Prickett must have been living in Coal City, Illinois in 1888.  This might seem so obvious that it should classified in the "duh" category, but some people miss the fact that you can use the birthplaces of the children in a family to figure out where the family was living at a particular time.  And if you happen to know the birthplace of the oldest child in a family, that birthplace might be the same location where the parents of the family were married.  In this case, my grandfather was NOT the oldest child in the family, but after talking to relatives I learned that he was the second child in the family and that even the first child was born in this same area of Illinois.

By Googling "Coal City, Illinois" we find that Coal City is in Grundy County, Illinois, which is southwest of Chicago.  The intent of this blog entry is to discuss the information available on marriage records.  If you are married and you think about the process you went through, you will realize that from the legal perspective, you had to apply for a "marriage license" at your local courthouse.  Once the license was issued, the person who conducted the marriage and two witnesses had to sign the license and then return it to the courthouse for filing.  So the county courthouse for the county in which the marriage was performed is the place that should have a copy of the marriage record.  

In today's world, some states have centralized their marriage records so that you can request copies from a statewide web site in the same way that you would request a birth or death record.  But even in these cases, the county courthouse will still have a copy of the record also.  In most counties in the United States, marriage records are kept in the office of the probate court.  This might seem a bit illogical if you think of probate as the process of reallocating your assets at the end of your life.  But actually, when a person marries, they are changing the way that their end of life assets will be distributed, so perhaps it isn't THAT illogical after all.

So I know that I want to request a copy of the marriage license for Charles E. Miller and Ellen Prickett from the probate court office in Grundy County, Illinois.  Almost always, you will also have to have at least an approximate date for when the marriage occurred.  In this case, I know that my grandfather was born September 20, 1888, so normally, one could assume that Charles and Ellen were married by the beginning of 1888 (given the nine month gestation period for humans).  But my grandfather had an older brother, Frank Miller, who was born on November 26, 1886 (also in this same part of Illinois).  So if Charles and Ellen followed a normal path, they would have been married around January or February of 1886.

I sent a letter along with the ubiquitous fee to the probate court office in Morris, Illinois (Morris is the county seat of Grundy county).  Then I waited and waited and waited, and FINALLY I got mail from Grundy county...AND, they FOUND the marriage record!  This is what I got:

What can we learn from this document?  First we see that they were married by a minister named John S. Keir in Braidwood, Will County, Illinois.  So they might have been religious and might have attended a church in the next county over from Grundy County (Will county is east of Grundy county).  We also have exact dates for the marriage:  the license was issued on 26 January 1886 and the ceremony was performed on 27 January 1886.  Henry C. Stockwell and Anderino(?) E. Francis were witnesses to the marriage, so these people might have been friends of Charles and Ellen.  Both Charles and Ellen were living in Braceville, Illinois which is a city adjacent to Coal City where my grandfather was born.  Charles name is shown as "C.E. Miller" so we now know that his middle initial is "E."  Ellen's name is shown as "Jane E. Pricket" so her name must actually be "Jane Ellen Prickett.."

Going to the second page we find a gold mine!  Charles Miller was a 33 year old farmer, so he must have been born in about 1853.  He was born in "Senaca Falls, NY" and the names of his parents were "Jacob E. Miller" and "M.E. Egner."  For Jane Ellen, we see that she is 32 years old so she must have been born in about 1854.  She was born in "Arena Township" in Grundy County and was the daughter of "Charles Pricket" and "Adelian Holderman."  And finally we have the actual signatures of Charles and Jane Ellen!

So, in summary, to go back another generation for Charles E. Miller we should look his parents, Jacob E. Miller and M.E. Egner, in "Senaca Falls, NY" in the early 1850s, and for Jane Ellen Pricket we should look for her parents, Charles Pricket and "Adelian" Holderman right here in Grundy County, Illinois in the "Arena Township" in the mid-1850s!

Using death certificates to continue your research

In the previous blog entry we used information from our birth certificate to begin our family tree.   In my personal case, I am able to get birth certificates for myself and for my parents before I hit the year 1900 before which most states did not use this form of registration.  From the three birth certificates I am able to create a family tree that looks like this:

Notice that all of my grandparents were born prior to 1900.  One of my grandparents (George W. Miller) filed a "delayed birth certificate" (see previous blog entry) in 1942, but the remaining three grandparents did not do so.  As a result we need a different kind of document to extend our tree back another generation, so in this blog entry we'll take a look at death certificates.

To get a copy of a death certificate we need to know the name of the person and the date and place where they died.  I am very fortunate to have actually known all of my grandparents, and, as a result, I know when each of them died.  If this isn't true for you, you might be able to get the needed information in one of the following ways:

1. Ask your own parents when their parents died.  The death of a parent is traumatic enough that most people will remember the details of the event.
2. If there is a cemetery where members of your family are typically buried, visit the cemetery to attempt to find the grave of your ancestor. Frequently (but not always) the sexton of the cemetery (the record keeper) will have a list of all of the people buried in the cemetery along with a notation of where in the cemetery they are buried.  From either the sexton's entry or from the person's tombstone, you might be able to get the date of death.  (I will devote an entire blog entry in the future to the pros and cons of looking at cemeteries.)
3. In today's world, there is a very handy free web site called FindAGrave.com where you can enter a person's name and possibly locate the person's grave.  Here, and in almost all of the other research you will do, the more unusual the name of your ancestor, the easier it will be to find.  For example, at FindAGrave.com there are currently 2122 George W. Millers in their database, but there is only one Harry C. Ostegren.
4. If the person died in era of Social Security and if they claimed the death benefit that is available from Social Security, they will be listed in a database called the Social Security Death Index (SSDI).  SSDI will tell you when the person died and the location to which the death benefit was sent.  Normally but not always the location is the same as the place where the person died.  A free online version of this database is available from the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints web site:  https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1202535.
5. Finally, if all else fails, you can take an educated guess at the information.  For example, my grandfather George W. Miller was born in 1888.  I know that most people die when they are somewhere between 70 and 85.  The fact that my father was born in Colorado means that my grandfather was at least living in Colorado in 1916.  So my guess would be that my grandfather died in Colorado somewhere between 1958 and 1973.  (In reality he died in Colorado in 1960.)

With the name and the date and place of the person's death in hand, you are set to order a copy of their death certificate.  Death certificates are usually maintained by the health department or the bureau of statistics in each state.  Just like birth certificates, the process of ordering a death certificate will vary from state to state.  To find out where to start use Google to search for "death certificates in xxxx" -- where xxxx is the name of the state in question.  Once again there will be a fee for the death certificate.  And once again there are privacy rules in some states that regulate who is entitled to get a copy of a death certificate.  You SHOULD always be able to get a copy of the death certificate for your own grandparents.

After waiting one or two weeks since placing your order, the death certificate will arrive in your mailbox!  (How exciting!)  A typical death certificate looks like this:

What new information can we get from this death certificate?  First a word of caution.  You can safely assume that some of the information on the death is absolutely correct.  For example, the date of death, place of death and cause of death will most likely be correct because they are recorded at the time of the event.  The remaining information should be viewed keeping in mind the credibility of the informant.  The informant (the person who provided the remaining information) might know the dead person really well and all of their information might be accurate.  But the informant may just THINK they know the dead person really well and some of the information might be wrong.  Or the informant may realize that they didn't really know the person well and they might just guess at the missing information or not provide it at all.  I have some death certificates in which even the dead person's spouse didn't know things like the name of the dead person's parents.  So the moral of the story is that you should use the informant's information as SUGGESTIONS of the facts and they try to corroborate the information with other sources.

In the example death certificate I attached to this blog entry, I believe that my mother (the informant) provided accurate information about her father.  So from the death certificate we see the date of death, place of death and cause of death.  We see the place of birth and the year of birth along with the names of the dead person's parents.   We also see the street address where the dead person lived and the "usual occupation" of the dead person.  Finally, we see the name and location of the cemetery where the person was buried and the date of burial.

One of the things that I personally like to track is the cause of death for the person.  I do this partly because I want to know if there are genetic tendencies toward a particular illness in my family.  In the case of my grandfather, we see that he died of metastatic squamous cell carcinoma.  If you Google this disease, you find that it is skin cancer that spread through his body.  But if you do a little more reading you find that this is not the type of skin cancer that is normally considered deadly.  Squamous cell carcinoma is normally treated easily by surgically removing it.  The more dangerous type of skin cancer is called melanoma.  If you notice, my grandfather spent his early life as a farmer and the idea that a farmer would develop skin cancer later in life is not unexpected.  So why did he die of squamous cell carcinoma?  I'll never know for certain, but one of the things I remember from knowing him was that over the years he had a number of skin cancers removed from his body...especially his face and ears.  I personally think that, at the age of 85, he had had enough surgeries and that he basically "gave up" and let the later ones go untreated.  But that is only my theory and no one can prove it one way or the other.

So death certificates can provide a way of extending your tree.  But once again, most states didn't routinely use death certificates until about 1900.  However if you think about it, if the average person dies at age 70, then death certificates might let you extend your tree back to people who were born in 1830.

Getting started: Use your birth certificate as a starting point.

When I talk to friends and acquaintances about genealogy, they often tell me that they know nothing about their family history.  Of course that really isn’t true.  Most people know where they were born and the names of their parents.  Even if this is true for you, I highly recommend that you begin your search by taking a look at your own birth certificate.  In the United States, almost all states began using formal birth certificates around 1900.  If you don’t have a copy of this very useful document, you can get one by contacting the state in which you were born.  Use Google to search for “Texas birth certificates” substituting the name of your birth state in place of “Texas.”  You want an official, certified copy of your birth certificate, so be certain that you go to the web site that is actually run by the state in question.  So for the state of Texas, you would go to this web site. Be sure to order the most detailed version of the birth certificate that you can get since you are on a quest for information.  I caution you to watch out for rip off artists who might charge you an extra fee for something you can get yourself.  There will be a cost for a certified copy of your birth certificate.  In the case of Texas, the current cost (in 2015) is $22.00 and it can take up to two weeks before you get it in the mail.  Once you have this certified copy, it can be used for other purposes as well – things like getting a passport, getting a driver’s license, etc.

Here is an example of a birth certificate from the state of Texas in the 1950s:

Looking at your birth certificate, you will learn or confirm many interesting things.  The exact nature of these things will vary slightly from state to state and across time, but in the case of Texas, we learn the city and place in that city where I was born (Brooke Army Hospital on Fort Sam Houston).  My parents were living at 758 Marquette Drive in San Antonio.  My 36 year old father was Floyd Wendell Miller and he was a captain in the U.S. Air Force who had been born in Greeley, Colorado.  My 32 year old mother was Dorothy Elizabeth Ostegren and she was a housewife who was born in Holdrege, Nebraska.  At the time of my birth, my parents had one other child (my sister).   When my mother gave birth to me, I was the only child who was born at that date and time so I don’t have any mystery twin brothers or sisters lurking in the shadows.  The informant (i.e. the person who provided the information for this form) was my mother.  And consistent with the idea that I am not a zombie, it is reassuring to see that I was born alive!

So what can we extract from this document?  First because my dad was in the Air Force in 1952 and since the Korean War was going on at that point in time, it is likely that he was somehow involved in the Korean War.  Since he was a captain that probably means that he had been in the military for a while in order to achieve that rank.  The Korean War began on 25 June 1950 (from Wikipedia), so his rank at least suggests that he had been in the military prior to the start of the Korean War…possibly during World War II.

Next we see that my father was 36 years old when I was born in 1952, so he must have been born in about 1916 in Greeley, Colorado.  My mother was 32 years old at the time I was born, so she must have been born in 1920 in Holdrege, Nebraska.   Already we have the beginnings of a family tree with you as the root and showing at least some information about your parents.

As I mentioned earlier, most states in the United States began requiring birth certificates around 1900, so guess what?   If your parents were born in the United States, you can also get a copy of THEIR birth certificates.  So in my case, I would go to the web site for the state of Colorado and order the birth certificate for a Floyd Wendell Miller who was born in Greeley, Colorado in 1916.  For my mother I would go to the web site for the state of Nebraska and order the birth certificate for a Dorothy Elizabeth Ostegren who was born in Holdrege, Nebraska in 1920.  Once I have those birth certificates, I will probably have the names of my parents’ parents (i.e. my grandparents) and where they were born.

Now you might be thinking that this stuff is really simple since all we have to do is continue going back one generation after the next, ordering birth certificates.  Well, of course, there is a gotcha!  Birth certificates were normally NOT used in American states prior to 1900.  So once we get back to someone who was born prior to 1900, we will not be able to get a birth certificate for that person and we must have a different way to continue our research.

There is one interesting exception to the 1900 rule.  When Social Security was enacted in 1935 in the United States, people who were registering with the system or who were applying for benefits needed to be able to prove their age.  This could be done in a couple different ways, but one fairly common method was what was called a “delayed birth certificate.”  The idea behind a delayed birth certificate was that a person could get a legal birth certificate years after their actual birth if they could find someone who witnessed their birth and would then swear to that fact before a notary public.  So for example, one of my grandfathers was born in 1888 when birth certificates were not used.  But he was able to get a delayed birth certificate in the 1940s because his mother’s sister (his aunt) was a witness to his birth and swore to that fact before a notary public.

One final note about birth certificates…many states have privacy laws that prevent anyone who is not in the immediate family from getting a copy of a birth certificate.  For some states like Texas, the critical information from a birth certificate (like the names of the parents) is already in the public domain via web sites like ancestry.com.  Many years ago I happened to be in Illinois near the county where my paternal grandfather was born.  So I made a side trip to the courthouse for that county and, to my surprise, I found that they had copies of birth certificates for everyone born in that county.  I pulled down the book and had just gotten to the birth certificate for my grandfather when a courthouse worker walked in and chastised me for looking at a “forbidden” book.  The moral of that story is that you should do your homework on local laws BEFORE you go to a courthouse!

Research objectives, the quality of data and what to do with the data you’re collecting

I don’t care if I am related to some famous person and, indeed, over the years I’ve been doing research on my own family, I’ve found the lives of my “common” ancestors to be much more interesting.  I also don’t care about becoming a member of the various societies whose criteria for membership is your ability to prove your descent from a particular group.  I hope and believe that I will always be judged on the things that I do rather than the things my ancestors have done.

I research my family history for several reasons.  First, it is like putting together a non-ending puzzle, and each fact you discover adds a piece to the puzzle and gives you some insight into how you became you.  Second, a successful hunt for information requires a combination of life knowledge, logic and luck.  You develop a hypothesis and then discover facts that either support or refute the theory.  Third, I find it interesting to discover the rare cases where I end up being a distant relative of someone who is now a close friend.  Fourth, as you pursue your research, you become much more familiar with other locales.  You might discover that a particular location has repeatedly changed its identity as national, regional or local boundaries change.  You discover things about the government, religion and practices of these distant locations.  Fifth, when I know what members of my own family were doing at the time of various significant events in history I can relate to those events in a more concrete manner.  When I studied the U.S. Civil War in eighth grade history I didn’t know what impact that war had on my family.  When I am “hot on the trail” of information about an ancestor, I devour everything I can find on that topic, and I end up with a more complete understanding.  Finally, I enjoy sharing the information I discover with other members of my family and with my interested friends.  Be aware that not everyone will think your wonderful genealogical discovery is interesting!  (What do they know? J)

When I was on a debate team in high school, I learned that “evidence” was a combination of facts and logic, and I still apply that standard to most things in my life.  So what exactly is a “fact?”  As you talk with people you discover that things you consider to be facts may not be considered facts by others.  For me the “gold” standard for genealogical research would be to have DNA evidence linking each generation.  I would, for example, absolutely know the identity of my parents if all three of us had submitted DNA and that DNA proved our relationship.  Even if you are lucky enough to have two living parents, you will ultimately reach a point in your family tree where this methodology is not possible because the needed DNA donor is long dead.   So we will inevitably be using some non-scientific sources in our research and it will be up to you and your readers to figure out how valid those sources are.

Moving down the believability spectrum we next encounter governmental documents in which your ancestors are mentioned.  There are many times in a person’s life when their government requires them to submit information about themselves and these documents can be a treasure trove of information for a genealogist.  In today’s world, for example, a birth certificate is filed with the local government almost the instant you make an appearance in the world.  When you go to school, the school keeps records of your attendance and progress.  If you get married, you and your spouse file a marriage certificate with the local government.  If you serve in the military, records are kept of your service and of any benefits like pensions, land, etc. you derive from that service.  If you live in the United States and many other countries, the government performs periodic censuses of the residents and you might be recorded in those records.   If you purchase land the government has a record of the transaction.  If you pay taxes, the government has a record.  And even when you die, the government has a record.  So governmental records are potentially very valuable in your research.   I will talk later about the various types of records that I have personally used, but at this point I’ll point out two things.  First, because of privacy laws, you might not have access to all of the governmental records you might hope for.  And second, because governmental records are based upon information provided by and recorded by humans, these records can and do contain errors.   It is not uncommon to discover an ancestor who, in one census, is listed as having been born in Georgia and in the next census is listed as having been born in Alabama.   There can even be discrepancies in the fundamental things like a person’s age.

In the same vein as governmental records are religious records.  Even if you are not at all religious it is almost certain that at some point in your family tree, you ancestors WERE religious.  One of your jobs will be to figure out what religion your ancestor practiced. Some religions keep better records than others, and the amount of information kept by religious organizations has changed over the years.  Because members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (a.k.a. the Mormons) believe that you can baptize dead ancestors even today, the Mormons are the gold standard when it comes to genealogical research.  Their religion encourages them to do genealogical research.  But other religions have also kept good records.  In early New England, many town records were actually church records, and you’ll discover that a baptism date is recorded instead of a birth date.  In Sweden the Lutheran Church recorded not only baptism dates, but also kept up with how well a person could read because of the desirability of reading the Bible.  In Ireland a lot of governmental records were destroyed during the “troubles” in the early 1900s and sometimes the only records that still exist are parish records.  Once again, remember that these records were provided by and recorded by error-prone humans.

You should also collect family anecdotes about your ancestors, but be aware that sometimes these anecdotes have been embellished.  Like the old game of “telephone,” the story of an event that happened two hundred years ago that has been passed down to today by word of mouth may bear little resemblance to what actually happened.  Personally, I am ALWAYS suspicious of grandiose claims like “I am a descendant of Moses” or even “my ancestor single-handedly fought off an attack by Indians and saved the village.”  In spite of these problems, family anecdotes can still be very useful and it can be entertaining to discover how the event was “spun” over the years; you’ll frequently find that there is at least SOME truth in the story.

As you collect information far enough back in your tree, you will probably discover that other people are researching the same family.  At the time I am writing this, I have identified 132 descendants of one of my great-grandfathers, and several of those descendants are interested in and are conducting their own research.  I enjoy sharing information with other researchers and hearing their theories about the family.  But be aware that their standards for acceptability are probably not the same as your standards for acceptability; use their information as a guide but not as absolute proof.

So in the absence of “absolute” proof like DNA, how do you make sense of data from these other sources?  Basically, you put on your Sherlock Holmes hat and keeping the quality of the data in mind, you look for consistency between the sources.  If four sources of information show your ancestor as having been born in Georgia and only one shows the ancestor as having been born in Alabama, you lean toward Georgia as being the birthplace.  Develop theories based upon your data but don’t be afraid to abandon the theory if compelling evidence to the contrary confronts you.

Finally, I want to talk about organizing your data.  When you are pursuing a single branch of your family tree, it is fairly easy to keep things straight in your head.  But sooner or later you will read a dead end on that branch and you’ll start on another branch.  Inevitably you will stumble on something that might be relevant for the first branch, and your ability to “switch gears” back to the first branch is critical to your success.  As a software engineer, I wrote my own program to organize the data I collected.  But in today’s world there are many good genealogical software programs available.  Some of these programs are free and others are for sale.  I have NOT surveyed all of the possible programs out there and I continue to use my own programs as my primary tool.  As we move further along in future blog entries, I’ll talk about actual data sources I have used in my own research, but for now I’ll just mention that no matter what you think about Ancestry.com, they put a lot of work into collecting a vast array of data from all over the world – but you must subscribe to their web site (for a fee) to access the information.  Ancestry.com has a desktop program called Family Tree Maker that interacts well with their web site.  I own a copy of Family Tree Maker but still use my own program.  Family Tree Maker currently costs $40.00 and it will definitely help you organize your data.  But again, there are other choices out there and some of those choices are free.

A bit of background about me and my interest in genealogy

I have been employed as a software engineer since 1984 and have been keenly interested in genealogy since the birth of my son in 1985.  Organizing the large amount of data one accumulates from genealogical research is a task that is well suited for computerization.  My personal genealogical hobby has therefore been a marriage of these two passions and over the years I have used my genealogical hobby as the impetus for learning the seemingly endless stream of new software technologies that are needed in my career as a software engineer.

While working at Digital Equipment Corporation in the late 1980s and early 1990s I came into contact with other Digital employees around the world who shared my interest in genealogy.  I developed a set of applications for the OpenVMS operating system that allowed users to enter and organize genealogical information for their direct line ancestors and then shared this set of programs with this group of Digital employees.  Then I set up a method via which users could submit their data to a central database and built a server application that ran under the VAXeln operating system via which users could search the central database in an attempt to find ancestors shared by other Digital employees.

In 1992 I left Digital and began working for Corning, Incorporated, and in that position I began developing work-related applications that ran under Microsoft Windows NT.  Corning purchased a subscription for me to the Microsoft Developer’s Network and once again I fell back upon genealogy as a driver for learning this new set of software tools.  So I wrote a C++ application called GART (Genealogical Archive and Research Tool) that used Microsoft Foundation Class library functionality to allow users to enter and modify genealogy information that I had imported from the previous VAX-based environment.

In 2000 after moving to the Atlanta, Georgia area and taking a job with yet another software development company, I created the first version of the Genealogy at Holly Mill Run web site.  By this time, the data which began as a binary file on a VAX back in the 1980s was resident in a Microsoft SQLServer database and was displayed for web site visitors using a series of Active Server Pages (ASP).  If a user “logged in” to the web site they were able to see information for people who were currently living and were even able to enter data for new people.  I also eliminated the requirement that a person in the database be a direct line ancestor of my son.  In about 2005 an enterprising hacker was able to corrupt the database by taking advantage of the way I let logged-in users add or modify data in the database.  Ultimately I got the web site back on line albeit without the ability to add or modify data.

In early 2015, I moved the web site from a server in my house to a server operated by GoDaddy in Arizona.  Currently I am developing a Windows desktop application that will allow trusted users to enter data into the database.

Over this 30 year period (as of 2015) the Internet has taken off and the process of doing research has become much simpler.  In the 1980s the proximity of a researcher to a regional branch of the National Archives was a key to success.  And even with proximity to the National Archives, a researcher was still obliged to correspond with libraries, court houses and genealogy clubs by US mail.  Patience was indeed a virtue!

During this 30 year period I became familiar with a lot of genealogical resources and developed some very successful methods for extending my own research.  I am not a professional genealogist, but via this blog it is my intention to share the knowledge I have and the methods I have developed for myself in the hope that others who might be just beginning their research can benefit from the experiences I have had.