Are Assumptions Hurting Your Genealogy Research?

Making assumptions about your relatives based on limited information can actually hurt your genealogical research. If you have completed even a fraction of research you may have already noticed confusion, errors, or even lies.

Proper research is based on gaining several pieces of information to verify your findings. The following are cautions you should be aware of during the course of your research in order to gain the most truthful information.

1. Basing information on only a name

Have you realized families loved to use the same names generation after generation? This can cause confusion when trying to decipher who is who. Match birth, marriage, or death dates to confirm your findings. I have a relative, Solomon Higgins. He married Elizabeth Higgins. Yes, Higgins as well. They were 1st cousins. So the confusion became two fold. First, her last name was the same as Solomon’s. Secondly, Elizabeth’s cousin had a wife named Elizabeth Higgins as well AND they were the same age. Therefore, I had to constantly check the birth dates to make sure I had the correct Elizabeth Higgins. Making assumptions that there was only one Elizabeth Higgins that age in the county of my relatives would have made my information incorrect.

2. Assuming your relatives stayed in one place

Yes, often families of immigrants stayed together in once place. However, do not dismiss the idea that a relative that matches name and birth 1,000 miles away from the rest of the family is not related. In doing my research often times it appears relatives moved to gain employment or acquire land.

3. Assuming records are 100% correct

I know. You want to take that death certificate and treat it like gold. You want to take it all as fact and enter it into your database and be done. Wrong! Use it as a tool and compare it to other sources you gather. In the picture at the top of this blog is a death certificate of my great great grandmother. It lists her surviving spouse as “John Meyer”. The death certificate is wrong. First, her husband died before her and therefore, was not ‘surviving’. Secondly, his name was Andrew Meyer. Now, maybe his middle name was John but I have yet to discover if that is the case. All other documents including marriage certificate and obituaries all confirm his name was Andrew and he died before her. Death certificate information is given by informants- someone close to the recently deceased. That person may not always know the facts.

Base facts on more than one document. Census records are notorious for errors. Information gathered for census records were taken at the word of whomever answered the door and written down as the census taker heard it.  I have even found a relative that was listed in two different households in the same census year. Her mother listed her but she was living with her aunt and uncle so she was also listed as living with them. It happens and should be noted in your research.

4. Taking certain websites as fact

When looking at websites research how their information is gathered. Findagrave.com can be a great tool if used as just that—a tool. Anyone can make an account and add information or pictures. I added headstone pictures yesterday for my family after signing up for a free account. I also had to send a correction request because I noticed someone else had listed my grandmother as having passed away in Indiana. She is buried in Indiana but passed away in Colorado. Being her granddaughter, I knew this as fact.

Investigate how information is collected for certain websites. Again, until you have a compilation of documents, treat information only as possibilities.

5. Assuming your relatives are law abiding, ethical people

This assumption has come up in my family. I had the documents, the research. However, I had some relatives who thought I was way off base. They simply assumed it wouldn’t happen. Too crazy for our family.

Through years of research I discovered my great great grandfather left his wife (my great great grandmother) with 9 children. She moved her single sister in with her to help her and sent two of her children to live with other relatives. My great great grandfather lives with a woman and a child that was born about the time they separated. He then moves with that child out to Oregon and dies out there. He never lived with my great great grandmother again. This other woman also, according to family legend, ran a brothel in Chicago. It is a long complicated story but needless to say, my great great grandfather abandoned his family and all his kids except the one he had with this other woman. He never officially divorced my great great grandmother.

You may, at some point, discover unsavory things about your family. Denying it will not change it. If all the facts are there after exhaustive research then accept it and move on.

6. Using others research as fact without doing your own investigation

The last assumption I will discuss is a big one. Never ever assume someone else’s research is fact. You may see someone else’s family tree on Ancestry.com or another site and believe their research to be firm. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I have come across false information on someone else’s tree. They may have the wrong relative entered in their database. I once came across someone who had a supposed relative entered in who wasn’t even born before their own children. It is common sense that if you were born in 1860 and your supposed children were born in the 1840’s that something is way off. 

I have heard of some people believing that just because you get the little leaf hint next to a relative on Ancestry.com that it must be true to their relative. No. Just no. Do your own research, check facts, follow your gut and in the end your research will pay off.