I haven’t been doing family history as long as many of my friends have been but the longer I do it the more I learn about the challenges and the benefits. For example, I used to just see the connections on my tree from the general database and add it to mine. It is on the database; it must be correct!?

Recently I was reviewing one line to decide what location to research. I found a 6x great grandparent couple that had lots of history written about them. He was the first president of what would become Brown University, a renowned Baptist minister and very influential in the local area. So, what is the problem?

I decided out of curiosity to look more carefully at the Research Help (warning).  There were 14 sources for this person and several contained the statement that he and his wife had no children, yet 4 were listed for him including one from my line. How can that be that he had no children yet hundreds of years of descendants?  There are no sources listed for births of any of the children, but then this was the 1700s.  I think my trail on this line has a disconnect whether someone else adds them or not and from looking at the comments on this gentleman, lots of others found the issue as well. This will require lots of help from the class we just had (more below).

The lesson, look carefully at all of your information including the hints and resources well before you add them to your tree. One of the things that I have been doing is to add those I have confirmed to WikiTree. I did this with one line and suddenly it was fill with confirmed ancestors. I wonder what or when that will happen with this Baptist minister?

In the meantime, I am working on applying what we learned in the last class on “Researching Beyond Your Ancestor.” That is what I was doing when I ran headlong into the “no children yet descendants” issue. Our speaker talked about Cluster / Fan Club Research, about exploring jurisdictions, the importance of social history, local history and then illustrated it all with a case study. She provided a lot of resources and examples as she shared her knowledge. A big takeaway on this one was, “SLOW AND STEADY!”

Again, my learning tells me not to expect to find things at the click of a mouse. She gave us a list under each topic of subtopics to look for. It takes time to find the right information and then to analyze it. What do the facts you find tell you about your family history or about what life might have been like for people living during the same time and in the same location? What organizations were they part of that could give you names of family, friends, associates, or neighbors? She even mentioned an organization that I had only recently heard of, Knights of the Pythias, that my grandfather was part of according to the records.

There is so much to learn when and about doing family history and as I have said before, history didn’t happen overnight and it is not going to unfold for you and me overnight. (as much as I want it to!) Time for more learning – Ireland, more Social History, Missouri, AI and so much more.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com