7 Reasons You’re Stuck Finding Your Ancestors and How to Solve It
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No matter how experienced you are at genealogy research, everyone eventually runs into an ancestor who seems to vanish into thin air.
You know they should be in the records. You know where they lived and the years they were there. But no matter how hard you search, they’re nowhere to be found.
It’s frustrating, but you’re not alone in having missing ancestors.
The good news? There’s (almost) always a reason you’re having trouble finding your ancestors.
Once you understand the possible explanations, you can adjust your research strategy to uncover them.
Here are seven common reasons why your ancestor isn’t showing up in the records so you can finally trace those elusive ancestors.
1) You’re not searching for the right name
Spelling is a common cause of preventing you from finding your ancestors.
Spelling was very inconsistent in the past, unlike today. Even within the same document, names could have more than one spelling.
Names were often spelled phonetically, such as Merrill, Merrell, Meriel, or Morrill. I’ve found my 3rd great-grandfather, Pierre Perusse, with surnames ranging from Pierce to Peyrusse to Paris and more. It’s an adventure researching him.
Another challenge is that men and women could prefer to use their initials or a middle name. For example, my third great-grandmother, Lucy Maria Jones, alternated between going by Lucy and Maria.
And, of course, women could marry more than once, changing their surnames each time.
Your ancestor may have also changed their name for various reasons and sometimes those changes radically differed from their original name.
I had a client whose ancestor was born with the last name Syvertsen but changed it to Paulson after moving to the U.S.
Other causes of misspellings are technology and people. Databases create indexes using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or volunteer transcriptions. Both OCR and humans can make mistakes when reading (sometimes terrible) handwriting from the past.
2) You’re not looking in the right place
In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for boundaries to move, even if your ancestors didn’t.
In The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James (a great fiction book with a family history theme), one of the characters says: “It's the strangest thing. I was born in New Spain, which then became Mexico, then the Republic of Texas, and wound up in the United States, and meanwhile my house has always stood in the same place.”
Our ancestors may have experienced the same thing as borders changed.
If they lived where a boundary changed, you may find your ancestor in an unexpected place. The records you need may be in another county or state.
For example, one of my clients had family members from an area of Virginia that became West Virginia, leading to records in more than one state.
Aside from jurisdictional changes, it may have been easier for your ancestors to go to a bordering county to do things like getting married. If they lived far from their county seat or there were geographical challenges like hills, they may have gone to the next county to do their business.
Image by jamesbarnett via Unsplash
3) You’re not looking at the right time period
While you may have an idea of when an event happened, even if only a range of years, sometimes things were not recorded until much later.
Someone’s actual birth year may be earlier or later than they claim. For example, men could lie about their age to enlist in (or avoid) military service. Women could want to appear younger than their real age. Or people didn’t know or remember when they were born so they took a guess.
Deeds could be registered years after the sale or purchase, like when the owner was planning to sell the land.
One of my ancestor’s brothers died in California in 1900, but his probate wasn’t filed until 1918! If I had only been looking in the years immediately after his death, which is more common, I never would have found it.
To complicate it even more, when I started researching him, I found his Find a Grave profile before the probate, which says he died in 1899. At some point, the family created a new gravestone and got the date wrong. But he was alive in the 1900 census and cemetery and probate records confirm his death in 1900.
4) You’re using unreliable information
This is a big one. Following the wrong path happens to the best of us.
Too often, we can get excited about tracking down a record with the information we’ve been hoping to uncover and accept it as fact.
Any and every document can have mistakes, even when recorded firsthand at the time an event happened or by a government official.
Sometimes people, by accident or on purpose, gave the wrong information to the person recording information.
On the marriage record for my third great-uncle, Horace Jones, he said it was his first marriage. In reality, he had married his first wife a few years earlier and was later arrested as a bigamist.
Someone could misrepresent a relationship. I have a DNA match that led me back to a great-great aunt and her daughter. One of them had a daughter, who claimed both the great-great aunt and her daughter were her mother on various documents. I’m still trying to figure out who the actual mother was. It’s possible she didn’t even know.
Likewise, a record might have left out information. Censuses and wills might not name all the person’s children, for various reasons.
Family lore can also mislead us. I believe that most family stories have a kernel of truth to them but can’t be taken altogether as fact.
For example, lots of people believe their ancestor’s name was changed at Ellis Island. That’s a myth. Ellis Island workers didn’t change anyone’s names, but many people did change their names after arrival to fit in in their new home and for other reasons.
I also believe it’s a personal choice whether you want to prove or disprove your family lore as “true” or not. But if you choose to believe a story without verifying it, it may lead you to “barking up the wrong tree” or getting stuck in your research.
Another common pitfall is assuming online trees are correct, especially when a lot of people share the same details. Many family trees lack supporting evidence and copy wrong information from each other without verifying their accuracy.
Do yourself a favor and use online trees as clues, but don’t add their information without double-checking it.
To be sure you’re finding the most reliable information, use original records whenever possible.
Also, if you accept the findings from only one document, you could be steered in the wrong direction. So, look for more than one record that confirms the same information.
5) You’re not getting to know the time and place your ancestors lived
To find an ancestor that has pulled a disappearing act, take a step back and get a sense of the location where they lived.
What records are available? Were there courthouse fires? When did vital registration start? What are the major events that occurred there?
If you don’t understand the basic history of a location, you can waste time looking for records that don’t exist or are in another location altogether.
Related posts:
How to Strengthen Your Cemetery Research Skills to Find More Clues
12 Rich Resources to Help You Research Poor Ancestors
10 Clues in Historical Land Records for Your Genealogy Research
Why Local History Books Are More Important Than You Think for Genealogy
6) You’re focusing only on direct evidence
To use genealogy jargon here, we want to find sources that give direct evidence – facts that directly answer our research question. But sometimes they don’t exist.
The record with the concrete facts you’re looking for may not have ever existed or got lost or destroyed.
You may never find a birth record that says who your ancestor’s parents were, with their age and birthplace (but isn’t it amazing when you do?).
You may need to gather several records with indirect evidence and read between the lines to solve your brick walls.
Image by fifernando via Unsplash
7) You’re relying on online resources
No judgment here. I love online resources and always start research projects with them.
But if you only use what is available online, your research is going to get stuck faster than you think.
Online sources are only the beginning of what is available to help your family history research. Most genealogy-related documents are not digitized. And they never, ever will be because of the sheer quantity and costs involved, no matter how much it breaks our researcher hearts.
Archives, libraries, courthouses, and genealogy societies are a must for your genealogy toolkit.
Related posts:
How the Digital Public Library of America Can Power Up Your Genealogy Research
Museum Archives: How To Use This Unique Resource in Your Research
Why Archive Research is a Game-Changer for Your Genealogy Journey
Final thoughts
Hitting a brick wall in your genealogy research can be frustrating. How can you find your ancestors when they have disappeared from the records?
While it’s frustrating, it doesn’t mean your ancestor is truly missing. Sometimes they are hiding in plain sight and you just need to know where and how to look.
By considering name variations, unreliable sources, a lack of direct evidence, and other challenges, you can uncover new clues and break through your family history mysteries.