Monthly Archives: September 2012

How Did It Get To You?

Do you think about how a picture or other item came into your possession? Did the person who gave you the image really know who it was? How was the picture or other item identified? Just because someone on the internet said it was a picture of your great-great-grandpa does not necessarily mean that it was.

Most of the time things things are right, but occasionally errors are made. At least give a moment’s thought to the possibility that the picture might be labelled incorrectly.

What Happened During the Gap?

I have a twenty year gap when I “lose” an ancestor. The only things I am certain of are that I cannot find him and that he moved during the period between 1850 and 1870. One approach that might be helpful is to learn about historical events that were going on during this time period and what have cause him to move. Were new territories opening up during this time? Did the Civil War impact his life?

Think about those “gaps” you have in your ancestor’s life? Then get beyond your ancestor and ask yourself “what was going on outside my ancestor’s life during this time period that might have caused him to move?”

Provenance versus Providence

You may think divine providence caused you to obtain that picture of great-grandma or that family bible, but provenance is what we usually call the “chain of ownership” for a family relic or document.

The provenance of a family heirloom shows how it came to us. It’s important to track as much of the provenance of an item as we can in order to know what we have is really what we think it is. The provenance for item indicates we know who the previous owners were and how we came to acquire the item ourselves.

After all, is that great-grandpa’s hayhook, or did you just pick it up a farm sale?

Names Switched?

My great-aunt is buried in Idaho. She has two tombstones–one a military one and other a joint stone with her husband.

The dates of birth and death are the same–born in 1910 and died in 1990.

One has her name as Anna M. Hutchison and the other has her name as Margaret M. Hutchison.

Never hurts to change those first and middle names around when performing searches.

And the stones should be transcribed they way they are inscribed. Commentary about what is “correct” can be made elsewhere.

In One Place Only

There are still records that exist only in their original form. They have not been transcribed. They have not been microfilmed. They have not been digitized.

Local records frequently fall into this category of being available “only in the original location,” but there are others as well. While it is realized that not everyone can travel to remote places to perform research, at least be aware that there may be more material out there.