Starting with Dave's parents: the Dwights and the Richardsons.
Researching the Dwight family:
I decided to start my research with my mother-in-law's family because we knew they arrived in North America quite early. Tracing the Dwight family turned out to be deceptively easy. The first immigrant, John Dwight, arrived in North America in 1635, and the family didn't leave New England for a couple hundred years. Many Dwights attained notoriety in one way or another, and the family had a reputation for being God-fearing, hard-working New Englanders of the most steadfast kind.
Further assistance came from a 3-volume family genealogy published in 1874. Apparently, genealogy was quite popular in the late 1800's and lots of genealogical tomes were written, some for wealthy Americans who longed to find royal or otherwise famous ancestry and whose desire for such inevitably captured the attention of charlatans only too willing to pose as legitimate genealogists and create royal ancestry out of nothing. This was not the case with the Dwights. The gentleman who penned the book, Benjamin Woodbridge Dwight, was a noted theologian and scholar before turning his attention to the family genealogy. No scandals or royal ancestors turned up in the book; in fact, the family came across as rather ordinary. This, however, may have been partly due to the book's format, a rather tedious list of so-and-so married so-and-so followed by a list of all their children, and all the children's marriages, and then then a list of all the grandchildren and their marriages and children, and so on. This format is typical of family genealogies that begin with one ancestor and trace all his descendants through time. Note the word "his". The typical format ignores the history of the female line. For a woman that means our mothers and fathers, their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc. aren't accounted for. We are effectively erased from the ancestral story. (See my article on the law of Coverture under the Works tab for more on this topic.)
Honoring the Women:
Personally, I have always found it irksome that genealogists emphasize the man and the surname and rarely focus on the woman (with some exceptions of course). This infuriates me since children are equally the product of their father AND their mother. I was determined to not ignore the women in the family history, so I traced their ancestry as well. This meant going backward in time and tracing every person in the family tree.
Fortunately, modern databases make it easier to do this, but it adds a lot of information to the mix. (More on handling that in a different post.) Anyway, I felt like I was uncovering a much more full and engaging history that honored all ancestors, both male and female. The bad news was that I was already a year into the research, and I hadn't even started on the Richardsons. Doing that opened a whole new can of worms.
Researching the Richardsons:
The Richardsons were English Quakers who had emigrated first to Spanish Town, Jamaica, and then to Pennsylvania. Samuel Richardson made a big splash in Philadelphia when, soon after landing and calling himself a "bricklayer" in legal documents, he proceeded to buy huge swaths of land, establish several successful businesses, and begin a 20-some-odd year political career, all activities well beyond the reach of your common bricklayer.
This seemed promising, but soon a new glitch appeared. Pennsylvania was one of mid-Atlantic colonies which also include New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. New York and New Jersey were settled predominantly by colonists from the New England colonies who brought a New England sensibility to record-keeping, so their records are pretty robust. The more southern mid-Atlantic colonies were not settled by detail-oriented Puritans but rather by a mix of people from different countries, different religions, and different cultures. This seems to have led to a less rigorous approach to record-keeping. Consequently, the records from this region are sparse compared to New England, New York, and New Jersey records. This posed several problems.
First, to augment the details of a person's life, I had to investigate more obscure resources. For the Richardsons I researched Quaker meeting house records. To find out more about the Herrs, who married into the Richardson family, I joined the Lancaster Mennonite Society to gain access to its wonderful records. At one point I even considered establishing Virginia residency to gain access to its restricted records! Fortunately, we only have a couple of ancestors there so for the moment I don't need to take drastic action.
A second problem was that having fewer verified records meant that the crowd-sourced ancestry sites had an even greater quantity of bad information as amateur genealogists grabbed any data they could get, verified or not.
A third problem was that it was much harder to figure out what these people were doing, why they were doing it, and with whom they were doing it. I was still able to conduct the research but there were a lot more frustrating moments and "brick walls" (a dead-end that despite months or even years of research provides no definitive answer).
I 'm still researching several of these particular ancestors and desperately trying to break through the brick walls created by the lack of a female ancestor's parentage.