From Inspiration to Action
February 10, 2023
In 2013, inspired by rumors that my husband's family had some really fascinating American ancestry and further motivated by a nagging sense that family history, once lost, cannot be recovered, I decided to research the family genealogy.
My interest in the topic dates to 1987 when we moved to New England. As transplanted Californians, my husband and I were often surprised when New Englanders, asked about our ancestry. In California, the land of new and shiny, that topic never arose. We were even more surprised when people, hearing that my husband's mother was a Dwight, nodded with interest and said that they might have Dwight ancestry as well. It didn't hurt that Dave's uncle, John Dwight, was a larger-than-life character in Vermont's Champlain Valley, where we lived. Nonetheless, it seemed like there was something else going on. Twenty-five years later, I finally had the time to investigate.
Like most people, when I started my research, I signed up for ancestry.com and enthusiastically began studying the resources there and creating a family tree. I should mention that there are several other sites like ancestry.com that offer similar services. I use ancestry.com here as a stand-in for all of them. These sites are wonderful ways to get started, but there is one big caveat.
A Note on Crowd-sourced Research Sites
Sites such as ancestry.com offer a lot of valuable sources of information. Unfortunately, my experience is that most people use the least reliable of their offerings. These are the family trees that other people have published on the site and make available to users. This is obviously a generous thing to do so I feel a bit guilty about what I'm about to write, but here goes. The problem with using other people's research is that you are trusting that they are good researchers and thoughtful about what they publish. Sometimes, however, people are sloppy researchers and don't verify the information they include in their own trees. I learned this the hard way when I researched generations of one woman's history only to finally realize that she was a second wife and would have been about 5 years old when our ancestor was born! Our ancestor was therefore a child of the first wife, and I had to throw all of the research on the second wife's ancestors away. The person who included the second wife as the mother of our shared ancestor was a sloppy researcher and had not noticed or questioned the rather jarring age discrepancy. This was a frustrating experience for me because I really wanted to uncover an accurate historical record of the family. Luckily, it happened early on in my research, and it effectively scared me into seeking out better vetted resources.
Ok, I'm a Research Nerd
Thankfully, such resources abound and include the New England Genealogical and Historical Society, The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, The American Genealogist, and various other scholarly journals and periodicals, history books, as well as church and society records. Colony and town records also help and can be found among the larger databases listed at the beginning of this paragraph. Local libraries and State databases are also quite helpful. Many of these organizations require a nominal annual membership fee, but the access to verified data and extensive resources is well worth the price. This kind of research is more time-consuming than clicking away on ancestry.com but again, if you want unimpeachable sources, this is the way to go.
But Back to Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com and similar sites can still be useful to anyone who wants to research their genealogy. You just have to be careful. If you want to learn about your ancestors and don't feel like going the academic route, you can safely use these sites by verifying the sources that people use to substantiate their claims. Always click on the icon for "sources" when you're looking at information in someone else's family tree. If there are no sources or if the sources seem sketchy (the source for a Massachusetts-born ancestor's birth record is a link to a site in Ohio, for example) then keep looking until you find a more reliable tree. Don't let one person's lazy "research" mess up your own. Happy hunting!
The more I got into it, the more I wanted to ensure that my findings were accurate, so I sought and received verification of my findings from established organizations such as the Mayflower Society and the New England Historical Society. As I gained proficiency in my new role, my earliest notes, scribbled on scraps of paper, were replaced by hand-written ancestor charts. As the information ballooned, threatening to overwhelm my attempts at organizing it, I began using colored index cards for each married couple in the ancestral tree, where I could add details and cite sources. Eventually, my research turned up 800+ ancestors and took over five years to complete. To be honest, I'm still tying up loose ends even now! Read my next post to see how it all started.