Gold Digging

If you’re new to pedigree databases, you’ll want to check out our tips for tapping them in the December 2003 Family Tree Magazine. Here we’ll look at five reasons these sites are worth searching in the first place—and how to mine genealogy gold out of the “garbage” of unverified online family trees.

1. Identity an ancestral candidate.

You’ve undoubtedly read one other piece of advice in these pages: When researching your family history, it’s best to start with yourself and work backward in time, one generation after another. But what should you do when that approach reaches a dead end? You’ve worked your way back, step by step, to your fourth-great-grandmother Matilda, and you have zero information on her parentage.

Here’s where pedigree databases can come to the rescue. Although you can’t count on the accuracy of whatever you find online about Matilda, you can at least see what other researchers think about her lineage—and then check it out yourself. Presumably, the genealogists who’ve posted pedigree files that include your ancestors (or at least individuals who seem to match your ancestors) have some reason to think their information is correct. So use these online trees to develop a theory—just don’t take the information as gospel.

For starters, you might want to search for Matilda in several pedigree databases. You may be surprised how many agree on an answer to the mystery of her parents’ identity—but this isn’t a popularity contest. Look closer and you’ll often see that branches in one online family tree are exactly the same as in other files you’ve found, right down to the way dates and places are entered, even the typos. That’s because researcher B has simply downloaded researcher A’s GEDCOM and incorporated it into his file, without verifying its assertions. Like a digital rumor mill (or a virus!), these family tree “facts” may zoom around the Internet: Eventually, researcher Z pops these pedigrees into her own family tree, never dreaming that researcher A, dozens of anonymous exchanges away, was just guessing.

So don’t go by quantity in formulating a theory to test Study the fine print of each possible candidate for Matilda’s ancestry. How well do the details, if any, fit with what you know? Are the dates plausible, or was Matilda’s supposed mother giving birth at age 6? Look for geographic connections: Remember that families and neighbors tended to move in groups — the basis of what’s called “cluster genealogy” (see the 2006 Genealogy Guidebook, a special issue of Family Tree Magazine, for more on this approach). So suppose you’ve traced the family of Matilda’s son-in-law, your third-great-grandfather, back two generations to Lancaster, Pa. If you find a candidate for Matilda’s father who also happened to be born in Lancaster, Pa., but who died in Matilda’s birthplace of Ashland, Ohio, that may be someone worth investigating further. He and the fifth-great-grandfather you’ve already identified in Lancaster may have migrated in a “cluster” to Ohio, where their families eventually intertwined.

Start with the most promising candidate from pedigree databases, then turn to the traditional tools of genealogy—census records, vital records, probate files and so on—to try to prove this possibility. You may be disappointed, discovering the facts don’t match the pedigree database. (Don’t say we didn’t warn you!) But at least you’ll have an avenue to investigate. Such a process often winds up in a bit of genealogical serendipity, where your ancestral candidate turns out to be a flop, but the process of disproving that possibility leads you to the real answer, perhaps a cousin or someone else with the same name.

2. Weed out the wrong ones.

As the previous point suggests, making genealogical progress is as much about discarding bogus ancestors as discovering the correct ones. That’s particularly true when, as so frequently happens, you’re seeking your ancestor in a haystack of people with the same all-too-common name.

For example, I was hunting my fourth-great-grandfather, the father of my ancestor Joel Stow. I’d found an 1825 marriage record for an Abraham Stowe Jr. (I learned early on not to worry about whether a name in this family includes the final e), listing Joel Stow as bondsman. The places and dates were such that this could be my Joel Stow, and the record suggested that he and Abraham Jr. must be related—possibly brothers. That “Jr.” meant there was an Abraham Stow Sr., who could well be the father of both men, and thus my missing fourth-great-grandfather.

The trouble was, the harder I looked for Abraham Stow Sr., the more confused I got. For the records I found of Abraham Stow to make sense, there had to be at least two of them living in North Carolina at about the same time. So I used WorldConnect to see what other researchers had concluded about the various Abraham Stows, and to help me sort the records into two (or more) piles. Again, I wasn’t relying on pedigree files for proof, just for clues in weeding through the possibilities. If several other researchers had already pieced together a theory that explained one batch of Abraham Stow information, and that fellow did not appear to be my ancestor, I could tentatively discard everything about Abraham No. 1 and focus on what was left about Abraham No. 2.

3. Connect with kin.

Those family tree files didn’t just magically materialize online—somebody put them there, most likely somebody you’re distantly related to or at least who’s researching some of the same lines. When you find a promising pedigree file, contact the person who posted it and compare notes. I’ve done this to connect with various distant cousins umpteen times removed across the country.