Online search engines find the most actively used records first. Many genealogists have about the same level of awareness and attention. They always look for the ordinary, comfortable, and usually the most used records first but sometimes also stop there. It is time to break out of the ordinary and look for records that may not be ones you are used to searching but may prove to be extraordinarily useful at the end of your search.
Very early in my genealogical journey, I started to read some of the books that were on the "reference" shelf in the local Family History Center. This was about 35 years ago. One of those books was the following:
Eakle, Arlene. 1984. The source: a guidebook of American genealogy. Salt Lake City, Utah: Ancestry Publ. Co.
Little did I know at the time that this book and another one,
Greenwood, Val D. 1973. The researcher's guide to American genealogy.
would become the foundation for establishing my genealogical research skills. One of the interesting things that happened over the years is that I became friends with Arlene Eakle, the original author of The Source but that is another story. What these books helped me understand was the breadth of types of records that constituted genealogical research. Even before I began to regularly use census records and vital records, I understood that these were only a starting point for research.
One statement, often repeated, about genealogical research methodology is that you begin with what you know before you jump off into what you do not know. To do this, you must make sure the information in your family tree is as complete and accurate as possible. This includes relying on validated records and documents that support a relationship between each generational advance. It doesn't matter how many documents and records you find about an individual unless those documents and records support a valid conclusion identifying a parent.
To start, make sure you have searched all of the obvious records first. If you have your family tree in an online, major family tree/database program, you can also begin by processing and validating all of the record hints suggested by the program. Validation involves carefully considering the record hints to make sure they apply to your individual ancestor or relative. Most of these early record hints and searches will involve vital records and census records. However, these sources are usually time-limited. For example, most people in the United States have a birth certificate but birth certificates have only been consistently issued in the 20th century. Many researchers who do not know this fact, keep looking for a birth certificate long before these documents existed.
If you get stuck trying to find a birth record, you may have to start looking into other records. Some of those that help establish a birthdate include:
- Death records
- Social Security applications and the Death Index
- Census records
- Cemetery records
- Church records
- Military records
- Bible records
- and many more...
You will soon realize that the large online genealogy websites seldom suggest some of these categories of records. One way to remind yourself to move beyond the ordinary records is to use a genealogy source checklist.
Genealogically significant records are those created at or near the time of an event by someone who witnessed the event or had a duty to report it. However, the person who witnessed the event or had a duty to report the event may have reported the event at a time remote from the time of the event. In addition, everything having to do with genealogical research is dependent on identifying an accurate and specific location of an event in each ancestor's or relative's life. General locations such as England or Germany are only marginally useful. So, the main activity of doing genealogical research is locating records that relate to events in your ancestral lines.
For example, the United States Federal Census records are valuable because they identify a person at a particular location and at a particular time. They are not so useful when they report the country or state where the parents of the person are reported to be born and the calculated year of the person's birth. If you were to find a draft registration card for the same person, you would likely find a record of the person's specific address as well as a specific birthdate.
For people born back to the 1800s in the United States or in Western European Countries, there are a seemingly unending number of possible record categories to research. Don't give up. The more learn, the more places you will know to look and the more you look, the more you will find.
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