A GENEALOGIST MUST ALSO BE A DETECTIVE

by Joelle Steele

I do a lot of lineage tracing online. What this means is that I am relying on other people’s data that they have uploaded to one or more websites, such as familysearch.org, ancestry.com, etc. I never fail to find errors. Doesn’t matter what names I’m researching or from what part of the world they come from. Errors abound.

Now you might be thinking, “Well, Joelle, then why are you tracing families online?” My answer to that is, “Because I am really a family detective, and I know how to spot those errors in the first place. And in the second place, I usually know how to correct them.”

Some errors are very easy to spot, but often are ignored. For example, dates. Mothers do not give birth before they are born, when they are only 8 years old, or when they are 72 years old. Hard to believe, huh? But I cannot tell you how many times I have found a mother’s birthdate years before the child is born. ALWAYS  CHECK DATES: birth, marriage, death, and birthdates for children.

Here's a very common puzzle I encountered just recently while tracing the parents of Nicholas. His father, Patrick, was born in Ireland and died in Kentucky. Patrick was married twice and was the father of 17 children. After consulting four online databases, I realized that all of the children were assigned to the same mother, Mary. There were the same typos, so this was probably one person’s genealogical efforts being uploaded and then shared by other people who also didn’t bother to check the dates.

Mary was born in Ireland, just like Patrick’s other wife, Johanna, to whom no children were assigned. Had the person who originally researched this same family bothered to look at the dates and places that Patrick’s children were born, it would have been obvious which wife was the mother of Nicholas.

How was this determined? I made a list of the kids in birth order. The first ten were born in Ireland, and that included Nicholas. So those children were Johanna’s, who was born and died in Ireland. After a hiatus of almost eight years, Patrick came to America and settled in Kentucky. The next seven children were born shortly thereafter in Kentucky, where Patrick and Mary died. Nicholas was definitely not Mary’s son.

These kinds of puzzles come up rather routinely with multiple marriages that have no marriage dates or have only birthdates for some, not all, children, or when there is a mistress who has  a child during the same time the wife is having children. The farther back in time you trace lineage, the more often you will find missing data.

A genealogist is a family detective. So, be a detective and follow the clues!