6 GENEALOGY PITFALLS TO AVOID
Simple ways to keep your research on the right path
Family history magazines and books are full of ‘How To’ articles explaining how you can trace your ancestors. But many people trying to do this become stuck, not because they don’t know what to do, but because they make mistakes. So, for a change, here is a ‘How Not To’ article, based on the pitfalls that I see people – from beginners to experienced record-searchers – succumbing to on a daily basis. By avoiding the mistakes highlighted in this article, you should find the tracing of your ancestors considerably easier. By going back over your work and putting mistakes right, you may well make that breakthrough for which you’ve been hoping.
Many people today base their family tree research on one of the big commercial genealogy websites. These offer a means of creating your own online family tree, and provide access to other members’ trees, and to original records. All of these facilities are extremely useful and have a great deal to commend them. But each, inevitably, brings with it perils to be avoided.
While the build-your-own-family-tree facility is an excellent way of recording and sharing information once it is established, I do not find it the best way of presenting and storing information about ancestors whose origins are not yet proven and about whom uncertainties exist. Different census returns, for instance, can often indicate such differing years or places of birth about an
Shuffling papers is easier than seeking out documents in an online family tree
ancestor, and it can take time and thought to work out whether they really relate to the same person at all, and to prove which of several possible births or baptisms is the correct one. Trying to cram all such possibilities into a computerised format that is designed to present facts rather than uncertainties creates a confusing tapestry of contradictions.
Equally, systems often demand a single year and place of birth, and whatever you put down, however uncertainly, immediately looks authoritative simply because it appears in a neat typeface on a computer screen, and may fool others (or even you) into thinking it is a proven fact, when it is only a guess.
The system seems to encourage one of the greatest mistakes in genealogy – conflation of two not necessarily related facts into a new ‘ fact’ that could be utter nonsense. For example, say you know your grandfather John Smith was born about 1920, and you’ve found a possible birth for a John Smith in 1921 in Acton, but don’t yet know if it is the right one; if you conflate these into “My grandfather John Smith was born in Acton in 1921” you could set yourself or others off on completely the wrong trail. This happens, and it happens a lot.
There may be computer-based solutions to this, but such speculative research is often dealt with best by making accurate transcriptions of the relevant (or potentially relevant) records, and drawing family trees in pencil on paper, annotated as heavily as necessary with different possibilities, and as many question marks as necessary. Shuffling papers about on a desk may seem fantastically old fashioned, but it’s much easier than seeking out documents that have been ferreted away behind multiple hyperlinks in an online family tree. The time spent writing or rewriting a pedigree in pencil is also time to reassess each piece of evidence and think about the problems.
Don’t copy other people’s mistakes
Access to other people’s family trees is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you may gain access to some wonderful ready-traced generations, and contact with living cousins as well. On the other hand, the material may be complete rubbish. The problem is vastly older than computers – people have been passing each other incorrect family trees for centuries – but online family trees, with their neat formats and clear typefaces, can make rubbish look a lot more plausible than a scruffily drawn pedigree on the back of an envelope, and the joins, where incorrect information was attached by accident to correct details, are much more difficult to spot. The best tips here, besides asking constantly to see the hard evidence on which each connection was based, are to look out for sudden jumps in places of residence (from Cornwall to Northamptonshire, for no apparent reason) or occupation (from farm labourer to merchant). Any birth/ baptism, marriage or death/burial details that lack precise days and months or locations, or that start “about”, or are clearly rounded up or down, are probably guesses. If someone got married on 23 April 1721 but has a birth of 1700 with no precise date, the compiler has almost certainly just guessed that the person was 21 when they married. In the past few years, by the way, none of the online family trees I have been asked to investigate that purport to link people back to royalty have proved to be correct. The big websites are very useful for establishing contact with possible relatives, but one mistake when communicating with your fellow researchers is referring to people only by their relationship to you, and not by name: “my mum’s maternal grandmother’s brother” leaves the head spinning, when “my mum Mrs Rachel Smith’s maternal grandmother Mrs Ann Summerville’s brother Frederick Barton” is clearer.
Don’t rely on transcriptions
Access to online records is a great boon that, again, encourages some easily avoidable mistakes. Often, there are three stages to access; an index reference, a transcription and an image of the original record. Newcomers frequently copy or print the first two of these religiously, and cite these as proof of who their ancestors were, and may not bother with the hard-to-read original. But both the index reference and the transcription were made very recently, probably by non-experts and could well be incorrect. They are a means of accessing and perhaps understanding the image of the original record, but aside from that they are of no value, in terms of evidence, whatever.
Worse, many transcriptions leave out details found in the originals: plenty of transcripts of censuses and parish register entries, for instance, omit occupations. The image of the original is the only relevant item. If you cannot handle the original in an archive (which is seldom possible now in any case, for conservation reasons), this is as close as you can come to a record made by or in the presence of your ancestor. The online transcription may help you read it, but ultimately it’s your critical interpretation of what it says that counts, not that of the firm who digitised it. Equally, the nature of the original record does not change just
because it has been digitised, so when you discuss or cite it, don’t identify it as part of a commercial genealogy firm’s record-set. If it’s a page from the baptism register of St Stephen’s, Ambridge, then say so; and if you think of it being from a vellum-paged parish register in a parish chest, which was filled in on a cold winter’s day in a dark vestry after a country baptism, then you will understand the context better.
Don’t fall prey to parish pitfalls
Online resources lead us quickly and efficiently to images of original records. But are they the right ones? Often, especially pre-1837, judging whether you have found the right baptism depends on context; it is in the right parish, but is it the only possibility there? Maybe there are other possible baptisms, but an over-focused online search might not reveal this.
Indexes are very bad at highlighting gaps in original records. They may suggest that there are no possible baptisms in the home parish, but there is one in a neighbouring parish, which seems a good certainty. However, it is often truer to say that there are no possible baptisms in the home parish
according to the index, but if you investigate further you may find that the original parish register has a couple of pages badly damaged by water, or missing altogether, for the very years when your ancestor was likely to have been baptised – so the possible baptism in a neighbouring parish will suddenly look far less certain. A technique here is to search all of the surviving baptisms, marriages and burials for several decades on either side of the missing patch to see if the surname existed in the parish at all. If not, then maybe the family had come in from nearby.
However, if you cannot find your ancestor’s baptism (because of a missing patch) but there were others of the surname there before and after the gap, then the chances are far greater that your ancestor was part of an established family in that parish, and was not from elsewhere.
Finding out what has gone into the commercial firms’ indexes is not always very easy, and even once you’ve found their coverage list it probably won’t be detailed enough to highlight small gaps; if you can search the register on their site page by page, fine – otherwise a trip to the archives may be necessary after all.
The original record is king: you cannot go back in time to ask your ancestors questions, but an original record made at the time stands some chance of recording accurate information about them. It’s essential to understand what each record is, and to be absolutely clear (preferably by writing it out) what it says. Vagueness often leads to mistakes. For instance, every year each parish sent a copy of that year’s register entries to the local bishop, so these Bishops’ Transcripts are an important resource, especially if the original has been lost. But these copies were often less detailed than the originals, and errors could be introduced through copying, so it’s essential to be clear whether a piece of information comes from an original parish register entry (which may have been made with your ancestor standing there) or a Bishops’ Transcript, copied out many months later. If the information you have seen comes from a Bishops’ Transcript, it may be worth finding out what is in the corresponding original register, if it survives – there may be further (and more accurate) details there.
Another mistake is failing to distinguish between similar events, by conflating births and baptisms, for instance. Baptisms could take place on the day of birth, or many weeks or months later, but even some professionals write lazily of “births” when they mean “baptisms”, and assert that someone baptised in 1700 was too young to be the person who died in 1736 aged 40, without stopping to consider that the person baptised in 1700 may have been four years old at the time. Similarly, a record of an impending marriage implied by a banns book entry is not identical to a marriage record. In addition, death records and burial records are two separate, albeit generally connected, things.
Don’t make assumptions on age
Until 1929, provided they had parental consent, boys could marry at 14 and girls at 12. However, many people won’t take this into account. Looking for the baptism of an ancestor who married in 1750, they deduct 18 and start searching for a baptism from 1732 back – and then express surprise when they don’t find one (because the ancestor
Until 1929, if they had parental consent, boys could marry at 14 and girls at 12
actually married at 15). Another assumption made all the time is that men always married and had all of their children between about 18 and 30, when of course men could marry and have children into their eighties or more.
Age creates other problems. If someone was 50 in 1950, they were not necessarily born in 1900, because if the person said they were 50 in a record dated 10 June 1950 then (if the age was being stated accurately) they were born any time between 11 June 1899 and 10 June 1900. In the context of General Registration, that means searching from the June quarter of 1899 forward to the September quarter of 1900 (because births could be registered up to six weeks later). The legal age of consent was 21, and often records, such as marriage licences, record “21” as the age. But “21” can mean simply “of full age”, which was 21 or more – and plenty of people claimed to be 21 simply to avoid having to ask for parental consent.
A common mistake is believing any stated age, because even when the recording is accurate the information can be wrong, especially when given by the illiterate poor who could not refer back to any written reminders of how old they were; or by old people; or informants of deaths who probably didn’t know the deceased’s exact age. However, another mistake is to be cavalier about this – if you think a birth record is correct even though it is not in the year(s) indicated by a stated age, then you need to be able to argue sensibly why the age may have been inaccurate in that particular instance.
Don’t ignore post-1837 records for pre-1837 kin
Many people become stuck in the early 19th century. Having worked back using the marvellously informative censuses and General Registration records, we are all faced with less detailed parish registers and the problems of connecting up generations. A common mistake is forgetting that, for the first couple of generations born before 1837, when General Registration started, you can still use these records. If your ancestor Fred was born in 1836, there may be a baptism giving his mother’s first name, but there will be no birth record telling you her maiden name. But the censuses may show that Fred had a younger brother Tom born in 1838, and if you obtain Tom’s General Registration birth record, you can learn their mother’s maiden name after all.
Similarly, a baptism in 1824 may reveal your ancestors’ parents as John and Jane, so you can look for them in the early censuses (1841, but particularly from 1851, when precise ages and places of birth are given) and if necessary their post-1837 deaths (again, for precise ages: in Scotland, death records start in 1855 and actually tell you the deceased’s parents’ names). Once you have identified John and Jane’s parents there is even a chance that they will appear as very old people in the post-1837 records; sometimes the 1851 census can give you a place of birth for an ancestor born in the mid-18th century.
Never ignore variant spellings
Before mass literacy, few families had a consistent way of spelling their surname and, even if they had, the clerks and clergymen who made the records didn’t know that. Anyone who insists “That isn’t my ancestor because they wouldn’t have spelled their surname like that” is talking through their hat, as are people who muse, “For some reason they decided to change the spelling.” No, surnames just got written down the way they sounded.
The more records are indexed, the greater this problem becomes. In the old days, searching through a parish register for children of Moses and Charlotte ‘Taverner’, you’d have spotted a child of Moses and Charlotte ‘Teberner’ easily enough and recognised this as a different spelling of the same surname. But if you rely on indexes, you’ll find all the Taverners, but will only pick up the Teberners if the index has a ‘variant spelling’ facility that recognises Teberner. It’s best in family trees to give people the surnames under which they were recorded rather than imposing your standard spelling on them all (and when transcribing records you should always transcribe the surname as written). But another common mistake comes when people take the idea of variant spellings as a licence to believe anything they want – that their Soames ancestors were really Seymour descendants of the Dukes of Somerset, when there are too many points of difference.
Avoiding that mistake can save you from another – allowing research to be driven by a preconceived idea. If your idée fixe is that the line goes back to the Seymours then you may never be objective enough to trace your correct ancestors. Worse, you may spend years tracing descendants of the Dukes of Somerset hoping in vain to find your line.
Many common mistakes in genealogy are due to people trying to save time, or be too brief, but a clear head, well appraised of the exact nature of the records and what they say, is often all that’s needed to break through the brick wall to find the next generation back.