Top 5 Genealogy Research Mistakes to Avoid – Greenhorn Goofs!

Here are 5 genealogy research mistakes (common greenhorn goofs) that you should avoid at all costs. These are rookie errors that less-than-careless novice genealogists often make, they are logical traps that are easily avoided by simple persistence and brain power! As you know genealogy is much more than NAMES and DATES, it’s why the term FAMILY HISTORY is much more valuable as an indicator of what the scope of this type of research actually entails.

So yeah, before we get into these 5 greenhorn goofs to avoid, let’s get you in a position to counter those and set you up for research success! To that end I’ve written a comprehensive guide called “The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Professional Genealogy Research Online” check it out, bookmark it if you need to.

1. MARRIAGE AGE RESEARCH MISTAKES

In an ideal world, a boy meets a girl and they get married sometime in their early 20s. The parents are happy and they head off into the sunset to start their new life . . . well, that’s not always befitting reality. Not only have people gotten married younger than 20, but they also have gotten married older than 30 as well as having age gaps larger than 10 years between the bride and groom.

Authorities Frances and Joseph Gies remind us that “the two great fundamentals of family history are marriage and inheritance, always closely linked” (1991: 107). What this means is that more often than not in European cultures a bride came at a price that represented an economic advantage for her family and a courting male had to be established enough to shoulder that responsibility – which may not have happened until his 30s. Those folkways are what “American” culture is based on and families often consummated marriages to keep their collective inheritances secure.

In medieval times marriages could take place as young as 13 for a bride, but rarely that young for a groom unless he came from a noble or well-to-do family. It was not uncommon for grooms to be in their early 30s before getting married as they needed to be able to uphold their end of the ‘obligations’ of getting married if his family was unable. These age gaps also explain why women tended to remarry after a certain age.

OUTCOME: For your genealogy research never discount a potential spouse because he or she may be beyond your allowable mental threshold when building your family tree. Never discount the possibility of an ancestor having remarried either. Of course, never add anything without factual documentation. That’s the worst of all the genealogy research mistakes.

2. MOBILITY RESEARCH MISTAKES

People moved . . . a lot! I’ve been guilty on more than one occasion of falling into the trap of romanticizing the past, picturing our ancestors living in stained-glass conditions in a neatly-kept hamlet somewhere in the English countryside. Life was good and our families “came from there” in that they lived there for generations on end. Nonsense!

Author David Hackett Fischer tell us that in colonial times “it was not uncommon for 20 percent of the population in a Virginia county to disappear within a single year and for 50 percent to vanish within a decade” (2000: 74). These trends were a continuation of the English norm. For example, in “Buckinghamshire between 1573 and 1584, more than 80 percent of the population had moved at least once in their lives” (ibid.: 12). That was in the 1500s!

The societies that were transplanted to the Unites States were also extremely mobile. Sons moved away from the farm in search of their own destiny, daughters married out and started their own households – from the 17th century onward this expansion generally went from east to west.

For one of my ancestors that eventually settled in Alabama in the early 1800s, his father moved at least 5 times over a period of 7 years from Virginia to North Carolina to South Carolina. My other ancestor that settled our family in Texas moved from Virginia to Tennessee to Missouri back to Tennessee back to Missouri and then eventually down to Texas.

OUTCOME: For your genealogical research the best methodology is to search locally and then broaden your search out logically allowing for ancestral names to pop up in your search. You may find that a few of your ancestors were very mobile. Also, scour documents like Censuses for places of birth that do not coincide with your perceived expectations and follow those trails. Avoid genealogy research mistakes of location!

3. IDENTITY THEFT

One of the penultimate genealogical goofs is adding an incorrect person into your family tree, or as I call it: “identity theft.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, these common rookie genealogy research mistakes WILL be disastrous to everything you do down the line after you add that erroneous person into your tree because of lazy research standards.

Cases of identity theft become systemic! It’s like taking the wrong freeway exit and still expecting to be on the freeway. It’s like not laying a level foundation, because everything else you place on top of that faulty base will eventually come crashing down. Worse yet, it’s like ANCESTRAL KIDNAPPING if you think about it!

OUTCOME: If you are unsure if a person you are researching is “your” family then simply don’t add them into your tree prematurely. Don’t succumb to the temptation! What I do is I create a file folder for that person which is labelled as a “potential” lead and only after I’ve thoroughly vetted them with corroborating documents do I finally allow them their place of honor. Avoid genealogy research mistakes of identity.

4. THE WEIRD KID

Another common genealogical mistake falls under the fallacy of composition which simply states that “all things within a set should all be the same.” As this applies to family history it is illogical to assume that all siblings are the same and have the same personalities, goals, lifestyles, etc. It’s very difficult to not treat our ancestors with the utmost respect and we very often impose our own historical biases on our research – hey, we’re here to venerate our family aren’t we?

I call this the “weird kid effect” by reminding us that in every family there’s always the weird kid! I know because I just so happen to be that person in my family. We’re not bad, we’re just weird – but weird is good I say! The weird kid probably did not follow the common societal norms of the day: maybe they got married late, traveled a lot, had a bunch of odd jobs, got incarcerated, wanted to join the army at 60, whatever the case may be.

In researching one of my family lines I actually found a “reverse weird kid” if you can believe that. All of the children of my great-grandfather that came from Lithuania were factory workers, except one, he was a physician! When I was piecing together that generation I had initially assumed that all of the 7 brothers became manual laborers which was the norm, but the aberrant one was actually the professional.

OUTCOME: Allow for the differences in siblings to emerge while researching. Always let the data inform your genealogical decisions free of your personal bias. Actually, you should expect and anticipate, even embrace, the weird kids in your family.

5. MISINFORMATION RESEARCH MISTAKES

I shouldn’t really have to say this but this genealogical faux-pas is so pervasive in research today that it simply needs to be reiterated. It has to do with how we treat INFORMANTS, DATES, and NAMES. This has nothing to do with “identity theft” but rather ignoring a document or record because the information it contained was taken at face value. Many times records are discarded because we fail to recognize that documents themselves are NOT infallible.

Informants are often wrong, dates transposed, names misspelled. 1872 might have been mistranscribed as 1827, that’s a 45 year gap. I’ve seen too many times on death certificates where friends of the family or relatives who are not well-informed state the incorrect maiden name or place of birth of a loved one. It’s a war of misinformation out there!

OUTCOME: Misinformation is a tough hurdle to overcome for novice researchers. Potential records should be pursued for what you can find within them but never really ever completely discarded because of what they don’t. I have many file folders labeled “possible” that I place records into for future comparison, it’s a place for them to hang out until you can get back to them. Over time you will develop a “sense” of when a record contains misinformation; those records need to have some extra level of corroboration and should always have accompanying notes in your family tree or on the records themselves.

SOURCES CITED

• Gies, Frances and Joseph. 1991. Life In A Medieval Village. New York: HarperPerennial.
• Fischer, David Hackett and James C. Kelly. 2000. Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement. Charlottesville: UVA Press.

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