Family History TIps--Part 12

Forming Genealogical Connections Based on Partial Facts and Theory
by Brenna Corbit, Technical Services Librarian

You have searched for the origins of a particular ancestor high and low. You have some valuable clues, and you ruled out every false lead, but you still have no concrete proof of connection. 

It is in times like these that you need to form a solid theory based on your facts. I have a few theoretical branches in my tree. I am not saying that the branches are true, but having it laid out helps give me a better focus for more research.

Here are a few of my personal rules to working with partial facts:

• Do all your facts line up to form a good lead? Put all your facts together and see if it makes any sense. Sometimes I make a Microsoft Word table of the evidence so that I have a clear picture of the whole, rather than having a pile of notes coupled with online information. I also attach the branch to my GED-COM¹ file to see how it connects. If the tree is public, online researchers may be able to offer assistance. Moreover, if using Ancestry, the shaky green leaf may present new evidence—be aware, however, many of its leads are often false.
• DNA matches can also help prove a genealogical connection.  My great grandmother Ida May Thompson was adopted in 1890 by a Riffert family in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. All I had from a court record was Ida’s pre-adoption surname, a date and a place. For several decades I was not able to find any convincing evidence.  However, I reexamined all my facts and new evidence came to light within the Riffert line, itself.  The surname was Shatto, luckily not a very common name. I went with it, attached it to my tree, and my DNA had an instant match to a Shatto researching the same line. I still have to examine more evidence when I have a chance to go to the Dauphin County Courthouse. I may be wrong, but I strongly feel I am finally on the right path.
• If you decide to make your family tree public and it contains theoretical branches, clearly point out for other online researchers that those branches have yet to be proven. There may be many novice family researchers with poorly constructed trees on Ancestry, but there are serious and seasoned genealogists out there who may be able to help you.
• Always rule out every possibility that your theory is wrong. Examine every shred of evidence. This means not only looking at the partial evidence of the direct ancestral line. Too often novices ignore the value of information found through siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. That means researching every land record, probate paper, news article, etc. associated with an extended family. This process may be lengthy, but it often rules out any false leads. 
• Give it a rest. Giving a puzzle a rest allows new ideas to form.  Go back at a later time to see if you overlooked a valuable fact. Returning to my great grandmother Ida’s conundrum, I overlooked that her adopted parents lived in Dauphin Borough, which was in Dauphin County at the time of her adoption, not the county seat of Harrisburg—that shred of information put me on a very hot lead.
• Other times, new evidence may surface. New digitized     records may become available. Ancestry and Family Search      are always adding new sources to their digitized collections. Sometimes, long-lost records may be discovered. I remember hearing of a minister’s records found under the steps of a person’s home. 
• Also, OCR² is always improving. Computer searching of digital text has been around for a while, but it has often proved ineffective. However, I find when I return to the same digital news collection a year or two later, I often find more information with the same keyword searches. In fact, in the process of writing this article, an OCR keyword search found the connection I was trying to prove for the past 20 years. That proof was an article about my 5x great grandfather’s first cousin.

¹ GED-COM—Genealogical Data Communication is a sharable family tree file system created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the same system the church uses on its website www.familysearch.org  It is the basic bones of most brands of family tree software, such as Ancestry, Family Tree Maker, Family Tree Builder, etc.

² OCR—Optical Character Recognition is a software that has the ability to read a digital image of text.  Many online digital collections of newspapers use OCR to keyword search the text.