Ancestry Magazine

How often have we been surprised to find a relative in a completely unexpected place? Why were we so surprised? Where were we expecting to find him or her, and how did that expectation stand in the way of opening our minds to other possibilities?

In my research experience, I have learned to appreciate that our ancestors struggled to make a living, to get ahead, and to protect their families—just as we do today. To my chagrin, I have found that they often took unlikely jobs and moved to unlikely areas of the country to create that life for their families—often to the point of complicating and confounding my genealogical research.

I have found that my own thinking often stands in the way of making real progress in my research. The assumptions I have made about my ancestral families have influenced where I search for information and how I interpret the information I find.

In this article, I will highlight a few examples that illustrate the importance of thinking outside of the box in tracking down our often elusive ancestors. I will use my own family members as examples, since I can verify firsthand what the truth is, as well as examples from my professional research work. Many of the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and not so innocent, and to keep my grandmothers from turning over in their graves at my public airing of family secrets.

Boundary Lines
Early sociologists were i nterested in defining communities and the boundaries of their influence. One proposed using a rather novel behavioral approach to determine the reach of a community: rut methodology. The approach says that at each major crossroads, wagons would make a deeper rut in the direction of the town where business was conducted, where people went to church, where people visited with neighbors. Sometimes this meant that people frequented communities and towns that were across state or county boundaries.

For example, John Hogan was born in Ohio in 1865. He died in Ohio in 1924. Five of his six children were born in Ohio and all but one died in Ohio between the 1950s and the 1970s. So why can’t I find any information on John in Ohio? Because he lived his entire life, from about age eighteen, in Kentucky, just across the river.

It is important to be wary of irrelevant political boundaries in our research. The metropolitan area of Cincinnati and northern Kentucky make up a social unit—obviously one that John Hogan lived in throughout his life. If you’re stumped in your research, think in terms of social units, not political subdivisions.

Surname Changes
People just beginning their family history research often get sidetracked with the many variations in surname spellings. How can we possibly be related when our names are spelled differently, they ask.

We have all heard the warnings about Anglicized names and what must be incredibly incompetent clerks at Ellis Island, always misspelling names (a popular myth, but that’s another story). And all of us must have at least one relative who changed the spelling of his or her name to get a government pension. But forget these predictable name change problems for the moment and consider the possibility that your ancestor just changed his name because he felt like it. After all, we do it today.

For example, a mother, father, and child are listed in the 199 0 census with different surnames. Is this a nuclear family or not? In this case, it is. Further research shows that the wife kept her own name after marriage and the son was equally nontraditional. In graduate school, he decided that he so admired his family’s original Danish surname that he decided to change his name. The probate court record reflects the change, but gives no reason for the change.

Religious Conviction
Similarly, consider the seemingly unorthodox methods of choosing a religion. I was raised Lutheran; my mother’s family was mostly Lutheran with the requisite smattering of Catholics and Jews mixed in. I thought my dad was also Lutheran. He was an American soldier who went to Germany and found a bride—and they both turned out to be Lutheran! What luck. Little did I know that my parents simply went to that particular church because of social pressure. The Baptists in the area tended to be Scots-Irish, the Lutherans tended to be German, so voila, a religious turnabout. Could this type of religious “conversion” have occurred in your family history?

Military Service
No one in their right mind enlists, or is drafted, into the service more than once, especially during war times. And certainly not for opposing sides of the war! But this might not always be the case.

My Uncle Fritz was drafted into the German army at a very early age. His draft occurred at the end of the war when Germany was struggling, and conscription of boys as young as thirteen and elderly men became necessary. So off he went. He served for a few months until the war ended and then he was captured and held for three years as a prisoner of war.

In his early twenties, Fritz decided to migrate to the United States, the land of opportunity. He did all the necessary things: he acquired citizenship, learned a trade, even registered for the draft. Conscripted again. This time he served two ye ars in the army—the same army that had, ironically, held him as an enemy several years before. He served his time, and upon release became eligible for the G.I. Bill. He later went to college and earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering.

If you look at the facts without the background, it seems pretty fishy: German P.O.W. getting money from the G.I. Bill. I wonder how someone might interpret that finding without the real life knowledge of what happened. I can hear it now. There must have been two Fritz Reinemuths born in the same year, in the same town”

Family Secrets
Indiscretions are, of course, one of the major reasons for distorted information and unexpected results in the records room at the archives.

For example, every record I found on the Stillman family indicated that John was the father of Mary’s six children. Church records, birth records, even death certificates showed John’s paternity. There was absolutely no reason to suspect anything but a nuclear family with mother, father, and six children. But I was wrong.

In searching the 1880 census for the mother’s family, I made a startling discovery. The mother was listed as a widow living with the first three of her very young children in a household, along with “Uncle” John. Further research into West Virginia records showed that Bill was the father of the first three children, and that his brother John was the father of the last three. It turns out that the family was trying to hide the fact that Mary had married brothers and lied to the point that even the children didn’t know who their real biological father was.

And Mary had other secrets. Her mother and grandmother both lived near mining camps in town, owned no property, and were unmarried. Census records show no occupation and no nearby relatives or visible means of support. It appears that Mary’s family had several generations of “entrepreneurial” women in it.

Migration Trails
We have all learned that we should track our family on the basis of large migrations, etc. The fall of the south after the Civil War resulted in migrations to the northern industrial cities. The expansion of the frontier and the California Gold Rush are other typical examples of options that many of our relatives took. Often families migrated with their church groups or with kin or friendship groups.

We know that most people lived and died within a relatively small geographic area. So we design our genealogical research around this premise. But there may be reasons for moving that are unique to the individual and have nothing to do with sociological trends. If we consider this, we open up new avenues of research—in places we don’t expect.

For example, who was Robert Houston? Census records of 1870 show two Robert Simeon Houstons—one living in Kentucky, the other living in Tennessee. They’re the same age, and both were born in Virginia. Of course they are not the same man because one Robert has a wife named Doodlebug and the other has a wife named Elizabeth. The children living with them are different ages and have different names. It’s a different family. Right?

Turns out that Robert was a bit of a scoundrel. His wife Elizabeth was as surprised as our researcher to discover Robert’s other family. The oldest son, for reasons I can’t verify, left Kentucky shortly after the census was taken for the state of Tennessee, found his dad with the Doodlebug in question and hauled him back to Kentucky—sans Doodlebug. Wife Elizabeth died two years after the scandal; Robert died at a ripe old age in the home of one of his daughters.

There’s also the Russian Jewish family who moved from New York to Los Angeles following the war. We might suppose it was for a job and greater opportunities, or maybe the better climate. No, turns out the family was playing with a Ouija board o ne night and it told them to move. So off they went. Every couple of years another child joined them until the entire family resided in sunny southern California.

Make no mistake, the historical trends we follow and the assumptions we make to guide our research are typically valid. In designing our research plans, we should always search in the most likely places for our relatives first. But when they don’t turn up, we need to think about other possibilities.

Mostly, we just need to remember that sometimes our ancestors did the darnedest things. And just when you think you know it all, and have seen it all, they will undoubtedly surprise you again.

Roseann Reinemuth Hogan, Ph.D., has been researching her family history since 1978. Her special interests include oral histories and social history.