Ancestry Magazine

Thorough family history research depends on the ability to find and evaluate all the evidence available to document a particular ancestor and his or her family.

To do this, you need to step outside the normal routine of collecting documents and begin to harvest other important information by exploring the history surrounding an individual and a particular family. This is often referred to as “doing the history.”

The first step in really deploying a strategy of “doing the history” involves focusing on all the details you can find about a specific ancestor and his or her life. This means taking an intelligent, thorough, reasoned approach to identifying and evaluating every available document that provides new information and a clearer context for an ancestor’s life.

Step 1: Ask Questions
To begin establishing a context for an ancestor’s life, focus your research on a particular individual and his or her family. One of the best ways to begin such a focused process is to remember the journalist’s trade: Ask who, what, where, when, and why. Family historians are fairly good at remembering to ask “when,” “who,” and “what” questions, and sometimes “where” questions, but they frequent ly ignore “why.”

Who? In seeking an answer to who a particular ancestor is, probing must go much deeper than documenting the name. Determining who an ancestor is should also focus on verifying his or her nationality or ethnicity as well as his or her standing within a particular area or community. We know how important ethnicity is to discovering all the information about an ancestor.

Also important to discovering all the data we can about a potential ancestor is knowing the full range of his or her activities in and contributions to the community. Besides being a farmer, was the individual a road commissioner, an elder at church, a magistrate, an office holder?

To make even a modest attempt to truly find out who a particular ancestor is necessitates a thorough and careful review of the widest collection of historical writing and records. In answering the first of the W questions—who—you begin the fruitful process of exploring and documenting the history.

Where? Another reporter’s question that often doesn’t receive the careful attention it deserves is “where.” Researchers are often content with minimal geographic context. But besides being identified in a county from a census record or a city from a vital record, our ancestors should be identified in the most robust geographic context. In what specific township or district is an ancestor found? Is he or she living in an ethnic neighborhood or on a farm? Is the farm on the frontier or part of a more settled area? Was it acquired through a land speculator, the government, or as part of a homestead act?

Fully answering the “where” question should involve looking at a range of maps. Finding the town, the neighborhood, or the farm on political, land ownership, and topographical maps can provide interesting and useful data that can be evaluated to determine more information about a particular ancestor.

Topographical maps can provide insights on where people may have attended church, bee n married, or conducted business. The closest town on a political map may be shown as a most difficult, and hence unlikely, journey on a topographical map. Similarly, frozen or dry canals, flooded streams and rivers, and the existence of a rail line may shed light on the possibility of where people worshiped, bought and sold goods, and executed official activities. Discovering the locales of those everyday activities will certainly impact where you go to find records.

There are numerous other reasons why the use of maps can be significant to genealogical research. If an individual is living in a predominantly German town, are there other predominantly German towns in the area? Are there maps extant that indicate any connectivity between these ethnically similar areas? What do maps tell us about the relationship between several towns or villages that appear over a couple of generations of family papers and stories?

When my father-in-law started a progressive letter among his siblings in the early 1990s, he obtained more than fifty pages about the family’s early 1900s life in Lee and Owsley counties, Kentucky. One of the more interesting things about the letter was the number of small settlements that were identified—many of which aren’t on road maps or atlases.

We learned of Wild Dog Creek, Upper and Lower Stinking Creeks, and Dry Fork, as well as Earnestville, Heidelberg, and Farmers Ridge. By locating these places on detailed maps, it became easy to see the relationships between the places and how the family once traveled among them. Mapping this progressive letter continues to bring clarity to the family’s history in the area.

Why? Perhaps the most underutilized of the reporter’s questions is “why.” Finding an ancestor in a particular place or engaging in a particular activity, and then asking why he is there or why he is engaged in such an activity sounds simplistic. But when it is answered fully, this question can help you be more thorough and find eve n more evidence.

For instance, an ancestor is found on an 1870 census. Besides accurately recording the data from the census document, ask why he is there. Was he born there? If so, when? Did he migrate there? If so, when and what prompted the migration? Did he come seeking new land to farm? Was he an early settler, pioneer, or homesteader? Did he come to work on the railroad? Interesting data can be discovered and consequential contexts can be established when you continually seek the fullest answers to a wide range of “why” questions. A true picture of our ancestors can only be constructed through detailed evaluation of every aspect of their lives.

Focusing on all the details of a particular ancestor’s life and asking the right questions means that you will be focusing analytical attention on each document you find. This analytical attention will assist you in finding the totality of documents available. Keeping a documents checklist can be helpful in ensuring that every reasonable effort has been made to find all documents that evidence a particular person’s life. The Source (Ancestry, 1997) contains a couple of excellent document lists to use so you can be as thorough as possible.

Step 2: Identify Ethnic and Historical Context
The first step of focusing on all the details of an ancestor’s life and all the documents that evidence that life is nicely complemented by the second step: evaluating all the contexts of an ancestor and his or her family. Identifying ethnic, religious, occupational, and historical or period contexts is critical in uncovering the maximum amount of information about an ancestral family.

Knowing that like ethnic groups tended to migrate together, settle together, and move again as a group will assist you in engaging in nearby research and locating ethnically oriented organizations and publications. Knowing why an ancestor is where he is and why he is engaged in particular activities greatly assists in building context, and creating appropriate contexts is crucial to successful family history research.

Step 3: Access the Histories
A third vital step in “doing the history” is identifying and studying all the geographic histories in the areas where your ancestors lived. The importance of this step cannot be emphasized enough. In fact, this step supports and validates the first two steps. Town and county histories, church and denominational histories, business histories, trade or occupational histories, and ethnic histories that are geographically oriented must be critically evaluated for information that will lead to more data sources detailing your ancestors’ lives. Often, exploration of general histories leads to knowledge of lesser-known, more specific, historical works. Indeed, knowing the in-depth history of the area will highlight more of the lesser-known sources and record types that might be extant. And doing an in-depth study of the history of an area typically means that the all-too-frequent research patterns of perusing indexes and only exploring surname citations in town and county histories must be greatly modified.

In the pages of general histories, you may find references to all kinds of unique sources. Check notes and bibliographic references for clues to small newspapers, perhaps even ethnic and religious serials. References to local laws and codes, diaries and daybooks, special gazetteers and directories, and business and company records may all be noted in general histories. Like any exciting detective work, evidence gathered during one part of a genealogical research process will likely lead to greater quantities of data and greater specific information for continued exploration.

General histories are fairly easy not only to find but also to obtain. The online catalogs of major research libraries such as the Family History Library, the Library of Congress, the Allen County Public Library in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, the DAR Library in Washingto n, D.C., and the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston can all be searched by geographic location.

Increasing numbers of general histories are available online—both newly researched materials and digitized copies of classic works. The websites of local public libraries as well as state libraries and state historical societies should be places of exploration.

Taking the time to “do the history” will help you solve many of your family mysteries. It is clear that doing genealogy is doing history!

Curt B. Witcher, MLS, FUGA, is the president of the National Genealogical Society and the manager of the historical genealogy department for the Allen County Public Library. He is also a popular genealogical lecturer.