Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show aside to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her that one of those heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are al...
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Brick Wall Busters: 7 Strategies for Breaking Down Brick Walls

Brick walls occur in every branch of our genealogical trees. They can stop our research all together and become a major time waster. I have had a handful of brick walls in my tree that I have been trying to breakdown for years now and only recently have began to get anywhere. While trying to break down these brick walls I uncovered several strategies that are helpful. 

1. FAN Club research

Sometimes referred to as 'cluster genealogy', this techniques requires you to build a social network surrounding your person of interest. The FAN club acronym was first introduced by Lisa Louise Cook as a way of dividing the social network into friends/family, associates, and neighbours. The conventional way of applying this technique is to use a table, however I have also found it helpful to create a diagram. 

2. Create an evidence table

An evidence table is a great way to analyze a large volume of information in a single table. The added bonus of this approach is that it can be performed for multiple people at the same time. I have used this quite often when trying to find the father of an illegitimate child. I place the names of the mother, potential fathers, and the child across the top of the table, then list the records vertically. Underneath each person I identify the relevant pieces of information from each record.

You could use this table for FAN club research as well if you are trying to determine the nature of an unknown relationship. 

3. Post-it Note family tree

Once again, this is a strategy that I use when research illegitimate children. Post-it note family trees are great because they allow you to easily move a person around without having to go to the effort of rewriting a tree or entering information into a family tree builder. I draw out a family tree diagram with the required number of generations on a piece of paper and leave space to place the post-its. Depending on how many people you are considering for the tree, it may be helpful to colour code the notes. I use green post-its for confirmed, blue for potential, and red for unknown relationships. 

If there are a few people being considered for the same location in the family tree, I place all of them there and indicate the relationship being considered on each post-it. 

4. Create a list of addresses 

When analyzing records it is not uncommon to find an address for the person of interest. If that person moved around quite frequently it can be a challenge to determine if its them. Creating a list of addresses can make this task easier. I list the addresses in chronological order and take note of any important information such as lodgers/boarders, major events, etc. that happened there. You can create this list in an excel table or simply with a pen and paper. 

5. Search historic newspapers

Newspapers are one of the most overlooked types of records. They often contain more detailed information about an event than any other record. The main challenge when searching newspapers is that they have been transcribed (and are than searched) using optical character recognition (OCR), which means there are often spelling errors. By using a broad range of search terms you increase your odds of finding all records related to your ancestor or an event. I wrote a post here on how to search online newspaper archives. 

6. Search different databases/websites

It is not hard to get stuck in a rut of using the same genealogical website to perform all of our genealogical research. Weather it be Ancestry, FamilySearch, My Heritage, or Find My Past, each of them has their own limitations. By increasing the number of websites that we are using we are increasing the number of collections and records that we are searching; thus we improve our odds of finding the record that we need. All of the websites that I listed above are free to create an account on, but only FamilySearch is completely free to use. All of the other sites do offer free trials and have free weekends therefore you dont need three paid accounts to use this method. 

7. Prison, military, OR immigration

When it seems as though someone has fallen off the face of the earth but you know they arent dead then they are likely in one of three places. If you havent already done so, consider searching for your ancestor in military, criminal, or immigration records. 


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Why you ARENT Finding the Records you are Looking for

Brick Wall Strategies: Assumption Breaking

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