Ancestry Magazine

As you already know, keeping track of direct ancestors or descendants from just one pair of ancestors can be a challenge. But how do you track multiple ancestral pairs and all their brothers and sisters as well as their children and grandchildren? Because it can be complicated to do just that, it is easy to avoid looking at those collateral lines and to focus mostly on direct lines. Doing so, though, means you are probably missing a good number of clues and certainly details about the family.

The importance of collateral line research can’t be emphasized enough. Collateral line research often provides the solution to a problem in your direct-line research. For example, suppose you can’t find out the original home for your Irish ancestor. You have searched all the census, immigration, naturalization, and vital records for him and his immediate family (parents, siblings, and children). But you haven’t checked the records of the ancestor’s uncle who immigrated at an earlier date. The county or town you are seeking may have been recorded in the uncle’s immigration, naturalization, or vital records.

Or, suppose a particular family learned that some land an ancestor held was very valuable. The ancestor had sold the land rights, but had never released the water or mineral rights to the land. As a result, the family assumed that since it shared the same surname through male descent from the original land owner, it should inherit the mineral rights. But the descendant of one of that ancestor’s daughters learned about the mineral rights, too, and because her descendants carried different surnames, they didn’t know if they were legally eligible to share the mineral rights. Tracking generations of the collateral lines makes it visibly clear that the daughter’s living descendants were a generation closer to the original ancestor and, therefore, entitled to the mineral rights. By plotting out all the collateral lines the rightful heirs become clear.

I have found Bible records, pi ctures, biographies in county histories, wills, land records, vital records and any number of important records belonging to people in collateral lines that not only unlocked several mysteries, but opened up whole new avenues of inquiry. But how do you easily keep track of all those collateral ancestors to make it possible to focus on them and not just your direct ancestors?

Genograms
A genogram is a way of drawing a family tree that represents not only the parental or direct lines of descendants but all collateral lines as well. Genograms can record significant life events, individual characteristics, occupations, education, and emotional relationships—all to provide a more complete understanding of the context within which an event arises in a family. Focusing on the facts in a family, such as who, what, when, where, and how, has been shown to provide important, meaningful information that helps to distinguish each family member as part of a larger picture.

The behavioral theory behind a genogram is that everyone is a product of his or her family’s history. The way a family communicates and behaves toward significant life events—emigration, adoption, illness, births, marriages, deaths, etc.—can help us understand the family’s attitudes and behaviors. Genograms provide a deeper and more humbling way of looking at a family’s history.

Drawing a Genogram
It takes a while to get oriented to the genogram’s symbols, but once you start using them to understand a family, you will automatically begin to see patterns emerge that can provide clues for your research. There are some computer programs that will draw genograms using at least part of your genealogical database information, but it is best to start with a pencil and large sheet of plain white paper, allowing plenty of room. The more uncrowded the genogram is, the more visual understanding of the family patterns you will have. (For the purposes of this article, we will not go bey ond four generations.)

The skeleton of the genogram uses conventional symbols from the field of genetics. Males are identified by squares and, in a marital pair, are placed to the left of females, who are identified by circles. A marital pair or reproducing couple is connected by a line. Offspring are denoted by extending vertical lines below the line that joins the couple, with birth order from first to last going left to right. Twins are represented by adjoining lines; adoptions by dotted lines; and stillbirths with a small filled-in circle or square (depending on gender).

To begin, place the couple in their birth families by drawing in their siblings, and then place parents of the previous generation vertically above their children. Previous generations should be added vertically above the grandparents, and newer generations should be placed below the children in the present generation. People who are no longer living are shown with an x across their symbol. Hypotheses about origins or missing information can be entered with question marks.

The next step is to put in some details. Include names; dates for birth, marriage, and divorce; major life events; and age of person at present time. These details will help to determine family patterns that will provide clues to new resources and even solve difficult research problems.

Using Genograms in Family Research
When I start working on a research question, I sketch out a quick genogram. It forces me to think broadly about the family and provides a more comprehensive research strategy so more clues will become available. Some great clues can come when you watch for naming patterns in the family and dates of key life events as well as trends in occupation, migration/immigration, religion, financial resources, land ownership, illnesses, family size and constellation, to suggest a few.

Some cultures, for example, have particular naming patterns. Placing the given names on a g enogram can help you see naming patterns and if you see it operating in several previous generations, it should be a clue for additional previous generations. In some families, repetitive names occur not only within the descendants of a couple and their siblings, but in previous generations before the couple even knew each other.

The Scots-Irish naming pattern gives the firstborn son the name of the paternal grandfather, the second-born the name of the maternal grandfather, the third, the name of the father. The same pattern occurs in the female lines. So when you are searching for a possible father of Samuel Miller (a very common name) who has sons James, Hugh, and Samuel, in that order, you might look for a James Miller as Samuel’s father, and a father-in-law named Hugh.

Every family researcher knows that dates are one of the important building blocks for establishing ancestry, but they can also become important for learning more about a family’s reaction to an individual event. For example, it was common for families to migrate following the death of the last member of the grandparent generation. If, in going backward to trace a family, you find a family in a new location, you might expect to find a death record for the grandparents right before the migration.

Occupations become important ways of realizing the different interests, talents, successes, failures, and varied socioeconomic statuses found within families. For genealogical purposes, they provide clues to research as well. In my own research, the work of one family began with only the name of the parents, occupation of the father, and names and dates of birth of four daughters (family in blue). Research on this family had been confused by two different families whose heads were both named Joseph Bean. In the end, the clue to unlocking the mystery came from Joseph M. Bean’s sister, Mary S. (Bean) Green (in red), whose husband was a merchant and whose descendants left behind more information to determine the rig ht connections than her brother’s daughters knew. By watching the occupations on both sides of the family, seeing the relationship between a father-in-law and a son-in-law, it was possible to weed through all the males with similar names and focus on the only one who was also a shopkeeper. That makes three generations of males who had the same occupation. The female lines lived longer and their surnames changed, but they carried with them enough details about the family’s ancestry to use basic research techniques in land and probate records to solve the research problem. If the focus had stayed on the male lines, the problem would have constantly hit a road block, but following the other lines made it possible to see the broader relationships in the family.

Tracing Behavioral Patterns
The next layer of work with a genogram involves determining the pattern of emotional responses a particular family has. For example, does a family “stick together” or “cast out” its members? How does the family respond to stresses of life events? What can we learn from that information to further the search? The following example will illustrate the emotional responses of a family and, hopefully, provide some new ways to think about research in your own family.

My maternal grandfather was a very charismatic person. He was highly educated, an activist in women’s suffrage and the first teacher’s union, and raised all four of his children alone after his wife died. My sister, brother, and I hold his life as a model against which we have measured ours, even though he died before we were born. Yet, two of this esteemed grandfather’s siblings, a sister and half-brother, became estranged from the family. This seemed an especially important observation since Grandfather, who moved East for college and stayed there, maintained a very close relationship with his eldest sister who moved west to Oregon with the rest of the family.

Before Grandfather died, he wrote a le tter to my mother with some very sketchy clues about his “estranged” sister and “wayward” half-brother, wistfully wondering what happened to them. A couple of years ago I decided to track down these missing relatives. My sister and I were dealing with our daughters issuing predictably adolescent threats to “run away from home,” so it seemed important to understand how our grandfather lost track of two siblings.

Using a genogram, I mapped out the family to keep track of the people I needed to find in my research. I found several people via the Internet who were willing to assist me in some on-site research in Oregon. Within a few weeks, using the vital records index, city directories, and newspaper indexes, we located information on the half-brother. His story was not a happy one. After being convicted of several small felonies, he was jailed in federal prison in Washington for ten years for forging a twenty-two dollar welfare check. He returned to Portland, died ten years later on a railroad trestle of undetermined causes, and was buried in an unmarked grave a few blocks from where the family lived in Portland.

The sister, Julia, didn’t fare well either, but she took longer to find. Clues about what happened to her came from understanding what happened to her children, who were easier to find. She had two children ten years apart. The youngest one, a daughter, moved back and forth between her divorced parents’ households, became a beautician, married at age thirty, but a few years later suffered from mental illness and had to be hospitalized. After being released, she continued her work as a beautician, but was hospitalized again and spent the last thirteen years of her life there. When she died at the age of forty-six, she was buried as a charity case by the Catholic church in Salem, Oregon.

The oldest child, a son, became a businessman and married a couple of times, but had no children. He had a difficult divorce and eventually was hospitalized because of mental problem s, too. Seeing these patterns with the children led me to consider similar circumstances for their mother, my great aunt. The patterns were unmistakable.

She, too, had a difficult divorce. A guardian was appointed because of mental problems and a couple, not related to the family, tried to gain control over her income property provided her in the divorce. A Circuit Court case challenged her right to have a guardian appointed to manage her financial affairs, but it was overturned by the Oregon Supreme Court. In the interim, her income property was apparently lost, and the city directories and census find her maintaining custodial jobs through the 1920s. She moved with her married daughter across the state line into Washington. At the same time her daughter’s marriage fell apart, she was hospitalized in the state hospital and died there a few years later.

Using a genogram to follow not only the collateral line information but the behavioral aspects of the family’s life led me to hospital, medical examiner, and divorce court records, among other things. They revealed not only what happened to my grandfather’s lost siblings, but provided a rich understanding of my family’s past.

Every family descends from a diverse group of people. By using genograms, watching for repetitive patterns in a family’s emotional life as well as patterns in circumstance and decision making, you have just one more level of understanding with which to find a bridge to the past. Starting with a basic genogram is only the beginning. a

Further Reading
Gilbert, R. Extraordinary Relationships. (Chronimed, 1992).

Marlin, E. Genograms: The New Tool for Exploring the Personality, Career and Love Patterns You Inherit. (Contemporary Books, 1989).

McGoldrick, M. & Gerson, R. Genograms in Family Assessment (W. W. Norton & Co., 1985).

Alice Eichholz, Ph.D., CG, is the director of Lifelong L earning at Union Institute & University/Vermont College, which sponsors the “Learn Family History Online” program. She is also the editor of Ancestry’s Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources (Ancestry, 1992).