Any Geneaologists Out There?

Need any help?

I do real research not the silly name matching most amateurs do on Ancestry.

Last Edited by TexasPaleo on 07/24/2017 05:00 PM

I assume you are using Ancestry.

Keep in mind there is a lot of bogus unverified "trees" on Ancestry. I can spot poor research right away.

You should always try to have ever fact backed up by some record and hopefully overlapped with another record.

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One of the greatest mistakes people make on Ancestry is assuming that because someone has big tree that their information is accurate. I've looked up my own ancestors on Ancestry and the amount of bogus information is depressing.

The greatest methodology mistake is attempting to research you ancestor in isolation as if he/she had no siblings.

You have to remember that before modern travel (railroads, cars) people often moved around with immediate family, extended family and even neighbors. People yous ancestors signed documents with should be noted also.

This is vitally important when run out of leads for your direct ancestor because if you can identify a possible sibling, cousin or old friend you might be successful tracing them back instead because they are a PROXY for your ancestor.

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I had an ancestor living in Missouri in 1811 and no information before that. Combing historical accounts in Missouri I was able to make a list of several specific people he was associated with in Missouri that helped co-settle Boonville, Missouri around 1810. Previous researchers blindly linked him as another guy in Virginia and just assumed they were the same person.

Following leads (that people ignored) and digging in Kentucky I found there was yet another guy with the SAME name in eastern Kentucky about 1804-1808. Digging in the local tax rolls and court orders I then found literally the same specific people seen later in Missouri. They had all moved to Missouri in a group around 1809. Basically all these people knew each other and were neighbors in southern Clark county. More research found even more links between them all and links to new relatives of my ancestor.

This also debunked the idea my ancestor was the same one from Virginia. He was actually from colonial South Carolina which verified yet more alternative leads ignored by everyone else.

Literally 200+ trees on Ancestry have completely bogus contradictory information about my ancestor while I have a radically different timeline that is verifiable and extremely well documented.

Unfortunately most new Ancestry users are not real researchers and just blindly copy other people's trees and don't verify anything. I've been doing this for 25 years when it was all books, microfilm, and courthouses visits.

Last Edited by TexasPaleo on 07/24/2017 06:08 PM

so you a Juuish ?

I mistook this for gynecologist

My grandfather spent a lot of time and money diving into our past. I wouldn't have spent money on it, but it was cool to find out our ancestors goes back to a Native American chief of the lenape tribe.

Another huge mistake people make is mixing up generations and adding or leaving out a generation because in the 1800s and before names were often repeated in families.

There was even a tradition of naming your children after certain relatives depending on birth order like first son after it's paternal grandfather and so on.

I see these Ancestry trees all the time where a wife had 15+ children and were still giving birth at 50. Doh! Yes, some woman had a lot of children but that wasn't the norm and the birth rate dwindled after 40.

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A good rule for marriages is that people usually got married around age 20 and often a little younger for the woman and a little older for the man. So before census data if your ancestor was married about 1805 you can estimate they were born about 1785 and so forth. The wife probably had their last regular child around age 40 and often a very late child around 45. Children were usually born 1.5 to 2 years apart if they had many and child deaths were common.

Last Edited by TexasPaleo on 07/24/2017 05:55 PM

Online I use Ancestry for compiling my trees and finding census and marriage records. I also add scans of original documents I collect.

I also use FamilySearch which has a lot of digital scans of original documents like court, tax and marriage records. Search the Catalog and type in the county name you are searching to find those.

It was combing through old marriage bonds circa 1800 that finally unraveled 25+ years of bogus research on one line.

Though I do check out Ancestry links when they come up in searches, I realize it's about as factual as GLP.

I've been depending mostly on evidence found on birth, baptismal, marriage, census and death records. Plus old newspaper articles, books and family stories. The LDS Family Search site is helpful but some of their "records" are listed as "unknown source" and thus questionable.

You are a serious researcher. Bravo.

My husband's genealogy is the most fascinating and puzzling. He is descended from Hawaiian royalty. Problem is, due to fear of assassination, names have been altered. Then there is the Hawaiian custom of hanai - giving your child away to be raised by other family members. This was also done to cover up the covertly continued royal practice of intermarriage between brothers/sisters, uncles/nieces etc. On top of all that, both the men and women had multiple marriages. Kamehameha had at least 30 wives!

Yes, it's been a lifelong passion.

In recent years I have been able to trace my ancestors back to Charlemagne and his ancestors -- reliably to about 580 A.D. (That's about as far back as western genealogies are generally accepted to go.)


If you need any help, let me know. There are great resources available out there for free: rootsweb and familysearch. I have been able to get quite a bit from them.

I got lucky and found a family bible with births, deaths, and marriages for my family in my grandparents' basement. Still it took decades and the advent of the internet for me to get all the way back.

Good luck.

OP, I guess you mean the LDS AncestralFile and IGI stuff.

Yeah, lots a bad info there also. I'd say it's a little more credible than Ancestry trees since most of it comes from older paper research.

All these compiled "trees" are good for hints and leads but the info still has to be verified and also weighed against contrary evidence and leads.

The older LDS information on my "Burris" line was garbage and it got repeated all over Ancestry and now dominates. :-(

I've pissed off a couple people trying to explain why their old info was wrong and they couldn't even see the internal problems with their own trees. I've got maybe 8 users out of 200 to at least correct the marriage info.

Eventually I just complied all the correct research into a thesis and posted to a free Rootsweb page so it at least comes up in Google searches and created a "non-specific grave" Find-A-Grave page for my ancestor that summarized the same new info and linked it to the children that DO have Find-A-Grave.

Last Edited by TexasPaleo on 07/24/2017 06:31 PM

His family wasn't the only ones that did that.

I lucked out with a great,great, great grandpa. I knew he was a minister in Pennsylvania - last name Dole but only knew his first initials. Found him in an old book about the founders of the German and Dutch Reform Church in America. Their little biography of him named his parents and birth location. From there, I was able to connect him to trees that others have been working on.

If anyone is on Ancestry I also highly recommend taking at least the basic DNA test. I took it on sale for $69.

When the results are done in 4 to 6 weeks you can link it to your tree and it'll give you a long list of users you are closely related to with a prediction of closeness like "4th to 6th" cousin.

Then it's up to you to look at their tree and figure out the common connection which helps to expand both trees, verify your research and give new leads.

You can also download the DNA data as a big text file and upload that to other DNA genealogy sites like FamilyTreeDNA for more DNA matches.

There's a general autosomal DNA test and then there's a more expensive male line only (Y-DNA) test and a maternal line (MtDNA) only test.

The autosomal DNA covers the DNA that randomly passes down through each generation were you get about half and half from father and mother.

The male line Y-DNA is the very specific DNA that passes in tact only from father to son and is used to match to people that share your surname if you are male. I assume the female line works the same way but from mother to daughter.

So I guess if a woman wanted to have Y-DNA matches she'd have to get her father, brother or paternal uncle to take the Y-DNA test. But "Both males and females receive mtDNA from their mothers, so both men and women can test their mtDNA."

Last Edited by TexasPaleo on 07/24/2017 06:51 PM

I know. All royal families do it. Queen Victoria's family tree is tied in knots.

That's funny! I found a bit of royalty after I crossed the pond in my research. At that point, the branches of the tree certainly diminish. The royals and elite were all inbred to some extent, for power, land, bribes.

The stories that go with it are incredibly interesting. I found one that caught his wife having an affair with their son and, as punishment, he locked them up until they starved to death.

I have found Mormon/LDS records not necessarily reliable as well. Someone decided someone in my family line was Chinese, when it doesn't make sense for the timeframe/location. Not to mention, someone in that line got a DNA test done and there was no southeast asian DNA, nor are there any other signs of Chinese ancestry (like family names, stories, etc. -- my other line does have Chinese ancestry, and there are names, stories, even clothing and furniture from China still around). And yet, that false information is still being spread around by family members. Even worse, someone wrote some sort of book in the 19th century that mentioned one of my ancestors (and considering the location and everything else, it is referring to him and not someone else with the same name), except the information given is at least half wrong, as if it's a partly fictionalized description of the person's life. It doesn't say it's fiction, but I also wouldn't know what was considered ok writing practices in the 19th century.

I've hit roadblocks on many branches. A couple of ancestors born in other countries jumped off ships in the early 1800s, so there is no documentation on their early lives. They may have been poor orphans or runaways for all I know. One may have been on a somewhat famous ship, due to the timeframe/location, but ships only listed the paid, high-level crew, so there is probably no way I'll ever know. One had his surname spelled at least 4 different ways, and I've had problems finding anyone nowadays with anything like that name, so it's either a small family or not a real surname. Another ancestor came from the Azores, where apparently they didn't use surnames until adulthood, when they could take whatever name they wanted. Another one came from Connecticut (I live nowhere near CT), but was born before they kept official records, so there are rumors that the birth may have been listed in a family bible, but I have no real way of ever tracking down where that bible could be now. I did figure out that one family member was adopted, I found her adoptive father's obituary online in an old newspaper, but it was in another language that I had to translate in order to figure it out. Problem is, we don't know who her real father was, we can only guess from DNA results what his ethnicity was. We have theories, but I've seen nothing in terms of actual records to substantiate the theories.

If you think Ancestry.com is bad, try finding anything online for the US but not the continental US. Anything pre-1850s or so has been almost impossible to find for my family.

I am a Genieologist.
I study Genies n bottles n shit.
You rang?

Is there anyone not descended from Hawaiian royalty? No one ever claims to be descended from the kauwa, the outcasts, ha. I figure Hawaiian royalty probably survived the arrival of Caucasians better. I was born and raised in Hawai'i, I also have some ali'i blood in there. I also have at least two family members who were hanai. We recently figured out that one family member may have had leprosy -- well, once you had leprosy, you were shipped off and everyone stopped mentioning you. You essentially died at that point. And they still haven't gotten around to making all the records public, so there is no real way that I know of to even verify if someone ended up in the leper colony. Native Hawaiians also didn't do marriage as we know it, people just moved in with people. And there's a specific generation where people just decided to adopt the practice of surnames, apparently. In my family trees, it appears they usually took the first name of their father as their surname, except we have someone in our tree who did something weird with their name, which has made it confusing to figure out who the father was. And then some family members took the Anglicized version of the name, while some took a Hawaiian-ized version of the name, and we don't know why the difference or if they were really all related.

That's true also. You have to cross-check the information that is out there. LDS does get it wrong, too, sometimes.

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Last Edited by Rev Woo-Woo on 07/24/2017 07:09 PM

True but his family is direct descent from Kamehameha, Alapau Nui, Kalaimamahu, Namahana and other notable high chiefs. Most are also Pi'o.

I got my Aunts research on my fathers side in the mid 90s. I started with that and from scratch on my mothers side and did it all thru libraries. After I got a computer in 2003 I really started making gains. I have several lines back to the early 1700s and into the 1600s. The records available are still astounding to me, finding gravestones from the 1800s still thrills me, and having to be a historical detective to sort county name changes to pinpoint exactly where your family was never bores me.

My favorite is a group of 3 brothers and their large families and some in-laws who went very early into Kentucky in the Boonesville area. They definitely did business in the fort and knew Daniel Boone. Most of this bunch went very early into Missouri, founded their own settlements and many of their descendants are still there today.

Off topic.. Are you the lady from Hawaii who used to call Art Bell on Dreamland and C2C back in the day?

Big families were the norm in thoses days. There was only one form of contraception available and it usually wasn't an option!

LOL! No!

Just asking, your sweet vibe sounds so much like that lady.

I grew up on the east coast and spent my summers on the Jersey shore. Usually we went to Shipbottom but my favorite was always Cape May. Just recently I found out that that is where part of my family is from! No wonder I always felt so at home there. :)

One of the problems that I have are some our family surnames themselves, like Homes, Howard, Long, Elliot, Bridge, Page, Flag, Green and Jean. Every one of those names demand crafty use of search engines! My primary Hodgson surname has been impossible to trace back any earlier than Henry in 1788, even though I do have my suspicions, which means nothing.

My Jane Howard grandmother, born 1808, is a nightmare to find, even with a host of proven sources both before and after her.

You'll discover that children who emigrated to America, or even other States here, wind up being 'lost' in time. No matter what verbal histories you have, if your known ancestor is not listed in a genealogy, only persistent detective work and loads of time and money MAY help you prove the family lore is true after all.

On the other hand, my Homes line stays true back through the late 1600s. I was able to find that my earliest proven gf Robert Homes married Benjamin Franklin's sister Mary, making Ben my uncle. My father and his sibling's eyes were all identical to Ben's. Luckily, Franklin mentions enough of these relations in his autobiography, that I was able to further find them in Samuel Sewall's diary, among others. I learned that Robert played an integral part in the Ulster-Scot migration, and that my uncle William Dawes rode with Paul Revere the night the British were coming.

Around the time of the Louisiana Purchase, many of the merchants in these New England families had moved to New Orleans, their families coming in winter months. The amazing trove of online records in N.O. is what actually helped me start piecing our history together...which then led me to New England and beyond.

Years ago, newspaper access was free. I was able to find so many articles, many with photos or drawings, that soon this history became 'alive' for me.

Resources like Google books, and even online websites for silversmiths, military reenactments, cycling and shipping have served to turn discovered names into memorable, historical figures.

I've even mapped our home and business addresses found in New Orleans directories throughout the 19th century, starting in 1805. The city becomes alive in unexpected ways when you see an uncle settle his family on a street, only to discover that his rear gate is directly across the road from the cemetery where they buried their beloved mother some years before. That seems loving to me.

It can easily become romanticized in your mind and heart...and full of the intrigue of infidelity and whatnot that surfaces in court records, as you sit at your computer reading the torrid, scandalous proceedings of a divorce. Suddenly, the name of that odd female you found in that 1850 census is recognized as 'the other woman'! Living right there in the same house as your grandma and granddad. Ouch!

The more you snoop, the more you will find.

My favorite discovery is the story of our elusive Henry Hodgson, and the girl he would marry in 1824, Jane Howard. Most of that was discovered in Lloyd's Shipping records, and includes a ship wreck.

I just wanted to illustrate that information can be discovered in the most unexpected places. Screenshots can help you capture the smallest of blurbs, and being able to paste them, including links, into a document with notes will help you build a history of these found relations through time.

Good luck to everyone!

Last Edited by esotericMorgan on 07/24/2017 10:38 PM