The Ancestor Hunt

What you don’t find can be just as important as what you do. The Insight Genealogists naturally focus on finding records. Every search is performed with the hope that a census entry, obituary, marriage record, newspaper article, or probate file will appear and provide the next clue. Yet some of the most important information in […]

Sometimes the fastest way to find your ancestor is to stop searching for them. The Insight Some ancestors left very few records of their own. Their neighbors, however, often left extensive paper trails. Families migrated together, attended the same churches, witnessed one another’s marriages, bought adjoining land, appeared together in tax rolls, and were frequently […]

The name that solves a genealogy problem is often not the one you were searching for. The Insight Many researchers focus only on the primary names appearing in a record. A marriage record, deed, probate file, court record, birth certificate, or death certificate, however, often contains additional names whose significance may not be immediately obvious. […]

Every search result tells a story. Sometimes the most important clue is the record you expected to find—but didn’t. The Insight Most researchers celebrate successful searches and quickly forget unsuccessful ones. That can be a mistake. A search that produces no results often provides valuable information. If an ancestor does not appear in a census […]

When records seem to disappear, the problem is often geography—not genealogy. The Insight Many genealogists spend hours searching for a record in the place where they believe it should be. When the record does not appear, they often conclude that it was lost, destroyed, or never created. In reality, records frequently move. Counties were divided. […]

If you search for only one spelling of a name, you may be searching for only part of the family story. The Insight One of the quickest ways to miss an ancestor is to search for only one spelling of a name. Today, we tend to think of names as fixed and permanent. In the […]