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Struggling for the past two years..need help?

Struggling for the past two years..need help?

Posted: 10 Jun 2012 4:02PM GMT
Classification: Query
Hi All - I would appreciate any suggestions on figuring out my family history. Some of the problems I have encountered are:

1. Too many woman and the trail gets cold (probably due to marriage). Also, I have three girls...hahaha.

2.) There is no record of my grand-father who lived in Maryland, the town he lived in had a major fire and all records have been lost.

3.) My last name is a Gaelic name with Scottish heritage, I would like to know my great-great grandfather to figure out where in Scotland he came from so I can visit one day.

4.) My material grandmother history confuses me, my family said her maiden name was one thing and yet, my grandfather's death record says her last name is something else.

5.) How can I find information on a man who has no paper trail? All my research is based on my great-grandfather William T. Black, Sr. He moved to Philadelphia, PA with my grandfather and yet, there is no death record or cemetery information. Why????

Re: Struggling for the past two years..need help?

Posted: 10 Jun 2012 4:50PM GMT
Classification: Query
1) You'll need to research for marriages. Where to look? Most likely you'll find marriage records in the location the family resided, start there. Depending on the era, you ballpark the marriage year. You found a women with her parents in the 1910 census, but not in the 1920, that's your time frame to look for the marriage. Depending on the location your researching in, in the US, civil vital records become more rare as you work backwards, this is the direction you always go. When you leave the 20th century to the 19th, parish registers are the source of vital data.

2) Civil records may go up in smoke, there may be a record of his baptism. Check the register records of the church his family attended.

What about his death record? There may be relatively solid data, as well as his marriage record. What are hoping to find on him?

3) Whom ever descended from your great-great grandfather in your line (great-grandma/pa) is the key to finding out who he was. You research great-grandma/pa's records, their death, marriage, and birth, in that order. The best record to find the names of parents is though their childrens' marriage records. Throw a wider net and research groups of children of a couple. There no such thing as too much documentation, if all siblings list the same two people as their parents on their marriage records, you can assert those were indeed the parents of your direct line.

4) Again, you need the marriage record. Data on the marriage is primary, grandma was the one who gave it, ie she's the direct source of the names of her parents on it.

5) Researching in major metropolitan areas is more difficult, particularly when you have an exceedingly common name like "Black". Until you get more research experience, you might want to back burner a very tough search.

All documentation you would like is not available on the internet, less than 5% is. The best thing you can do is learn research basics, ie; the resources available on and offline, how to use those resources and how to evaluate the data you're finding. There's are many "how to genealogy" on the internet as well as books in your local library. Preparing for your search is time well spent.

Re: Struggling for the past two years..need help?

Posted: 9 Mar 2015 5:44PM GMT
Classification: Query
Hi Kellie
Send me an email I may be able to help. Or confuse you even more but I'll send you all the info I have

Re: Struggling for the past two years..need help?

Posted: 9 Mar 2015 9:23PM GMT
Classification: Query
Edited: 9 Mar 2015 11:53PM GMT
About the maiden name discrepancy - I have many times found situations where there was confusion between a maiden name, and a married name from an earlier (usually brief) marriage. I would try researching under both until you find something that is definitive. For instance, if you can find a marriage record, and the name is different from what's on a death record, that could go either way because hard to know who reported the death, and she might have been married using a prior husband's surname (although sometimes you will get lucky, and the parties' parents' names will be recorded). If you find a birth record for a child, meaning that the mother almost certainly was the source of the information about her maiden name, that would trump pretty much anything else.

Re: Struggling for the past two years..need help?

Posted: 22 Mar 2015 2:47PM GMT
Classification: Query
Hello, Are you struggling? I hope not. I wasn't going to respond because:
1) I only began my tree in Jan 2015.
2) I have nobody with the last name of Black, yet.
3) Did I say I was a green newbie?

But I am because I had a problem with a father and son with the same given name. I relied to heavily on other people's trees, and the ancestry hints are not always pertinent to whomever you are researching. The father in my situation had no marriage license or bond for what would turn out to be the correct wife but had a large number of other historical references, but I kept finding a marriage bond for another woman. This was it turns out a case of me going to far to fast. I went from another of his son's in the direct path and never bothered to see what other children he had, which helped figure out this mystery sooner. One of those 'other' children was a son with the same name, the marriage bond belonged to him. All of a sudden dates, locations, etc all fell into place. Which by the way reminds me that when researching one ancestor if you look carefully you might just find something for another one.

I hope you are doing well in your research, maybe my post might help someone else from making my mistakes.

Regards,

Michael Cantley
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