{"id":2536,"date":"2017-04-11T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneosity.com\/?p=2536"},"modified":"2019-05-09T05:44:40","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T10:44:40","slug":"ive-hit-a-brick-wall-now-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneosity.com\/ive-hit-a-brick-wall-now-what\/","title":{"rendered":"I’ve Hit a Brick Wall… Now What?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brick Walls in Genealogy and Family Tree research, 2nd edition.\u00a0 Updated 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

It happens to everyone. You\u2019re chugging along, having a fantastic time learning about your family tree<\/a> and sharing with your relatives all of the fascinating facts you\u2019ve discovered.<\/p>\n

And then it happens.<\/p>\n

You find that certain someone in your tree that, no matter how hard you try, you just can\u2019t seem to get any further.<\/p>\n

Maybe you\u2019re stuck with a \u201cjump across the pond\u201d (i.e. you lose the paper trail at the time of their immigration). It could be that all you have is a name; maybe your great-great-grandmother is listed as living with one of her children in a census record, but you have no other information.<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve spent hours (or days…or weeks\u2026) trying unsuccessfully to make progress, what can you do to break through that brick wall?<\/p>\n

Give it time. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I know that you just want to keep pushing and searching, but quite often the best approach is to wait. With services like Ancestry.com<\/a> and FamilySearch continually updating their available records, you could very well come back after some time away and find that the one piece of information you needed is now readily accessible.\u00a0 Often new matches will begin appearing in Ancestry if you take a break from that particular record and move on to something else for a while.<\/p>\n

Go lateral. <\/strong><\/p>\n

No, I\u2019m not talking about football! Finding lateral lines \u2014 cousins, spouses of siblings, etc. \u2014 provides a surprising amount of insights. It\u2019s not uncommon to find a census record showing a brother living with his sister\u2019s family after he was widowed , or an obituary included with a burial record that reveals the names of extended family members.<\/p>\n

Reach out on social media. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Are you working with an unusual last name, or a family that tended to live in one specific geographic area? A quick search of Facebook or even LinkedIn might open new avenues.<\/p>\n

Be sure that you’re checking all of the available records with a broader and wider search. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Reference our article on using Soundex<\/a> search results to find misspellings and phonetic equivalents to the proper spellings of names.\u00a0 Many census and immigration records were created on the verbal account of the subject’s information dictated to the information collector.\u00a0 These jobs required long days and tolerating lots of redundancy so there are lots of strange and odd entries that don’t seem to match but eventually do.\u00a0 Thompson written as Thompsen or Smith written as Smyth are good examples.\u00a0 If a census taker met with a family recently who spelled their name Thompsen it wasn’t out of the norm for the census taker to assume the family four blocks away are related and spell their name the same.<\/p>\n

Also if you’re using census data and can’t find your relatives, something that sometimes works is to search for the neighbors of a previous or later census.\u00a0 Odd tactic for sure, but as streets are re-named and district lines are re-drawn sometimes people seem to have moved but haven’t.\u00a0 Occasionally neighbors become so close that when a family relocates the close neighbors do too.\u00a0 If there are strange non-family names present on death records or marriage records or other records they often are neighbors that are so close they are akin to being family.\u00a0\u00a0 Another tip: Neighbors in the cemetery may present clues also.\u00a0 That can be a stretch, but an odd named monument in the family plot is usually a really close friend of the family that had no other family themselves.<\/p>\n

Use records of the undertakers. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Using
Records kept by the cemeteries themselves can contain useful genealogy clues.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Did you know that beyond the physical monuments and the obituaries from cemeteries and newspapers there is often a record kept with the various undertakers?\u00a0\u00a0 It can be a challenge to access these records but they definitely can be found if they still exist!\u00a0 In our post Using Funeral Home Records<\/a> we explain that most funeral homes keep and maintain long enduring records.\u00a0 Not all of them do, but it is worth a shot.\u00a0 We’re often asked “What if the funeral home no longer exists?”.\u00a0 Sometimes funeral homes change hands or change names.\u00a0 If the funeral home you’re looking for (because they are usually mentioned in the obituary) doesn’t seem to exist any longer check with other local funeral homes to see what ever happened to the one you’re looking for.\u00a0 Start with the existing funeral homes nearest to the longest place of residence and the latest place of residence of the deceased, AND the cemetery.<\/p>\n

Cemetery records also exist on the “office level”.\u00a0 Some cemeteries have written and detailed records going way back.\u00a0 Some even have written journals!\u00a0 If these records exist you can expect to discover information absolutely unavailable elsewhere.\u00a0 Some interesting finds might include:<\/p>\n