I've made this mistake in my family tree research, have you?
There are times when I find myself talking to someone new to family history, about brick walls in doing ancestor research. I often find myself going back to the advice, that I have been given by the professional genealogists when I set out, to use more than just one website to do lookups and to beware of family stories. Now I don't consider myself to be anything near a Genealogical Guru, I am simply someone who has gained a bit of experience over the years and now, for what it is worth, I am happy to pass on some of my tips here. The two here are about stepping back from the research results and introducing some careful thought into the proceedings.
Consider the time-line for your ancestor.
> Listen to family stories, but then stop, think, and try to corroborate them with hard evidence to confirm what you have been told.
An ancestor's date of birth is obviously going to dictate to you an approximate time for when they could have got married or when you should reasonably expect them to have died. So a little thought should make alarm bells ring if a forebear seems to be getting married in their hundredth year. Its possible but rare!
Likewise, are they likely to be tying the knot at the tender age of 6 or 7? So beware of entries in on-line databases that just happen to have the same name as your ancestor, but are just plain and simply the wrong people. Also beware of received wisdom that tells you when the family believe their ancestor died.
I was doing some research, sometime back, and I simply dug myself into a hole and lost myself a huge amount of time as I mined deeper into the rich seem of wrong information. Shall I tell you the mistake I made and how I finally got back on track? I was attempting to find the details of the date on which one of my ancestors had died, in order that I could go on to buy the death certificate from the GRO.
Ancestry.co.uk is one of my foremost research sites. I like its content and I have become used to the way it works. But I do not use it exclusively, oh no. I have subscriptions to one or two others such as TheGenealogist.co.uk, which I find excellent and I also have a great deal of respect for the accuracy of the FindMyPast.com website.
Returning to the problem that I was looking into. I had seen some family history notes written down by a member of my family before he had died. My cousins had shown me this as we all shared a common ancestor in our great grandfather.
The hand penned memories gave the age of our ancestor at his death to be 66. I knew that the subject had been born in 1865 from the census and so I calculated from these notes that he should have died in 1930. I entered his details into Ancestry.co.uk and did a look up in all four quarters of 1930, but found absolutely nothing. Broadening my search for ten years on both sides of 1930 I spent hours looking and got nowhere for my trouble. I even went down the route of looking for misspelt names similar to my ancestor. Zero result and much time gone in the effort!
Eventually, after much wasted time, I thought about using one of the other websites that offers Birth marriage and death details, something I really should have done early on if I had listened to what I'd been taught. And what did I find? There he was, on the other BMD site spelt correctly and dying in the district where I expected him too, but aged 70 not 66 and in the year 1935 not 1930!
The lessons for me to relearn and hopefully for you to benefit from are as follows:
Please bear in mind that all websites are fallible and that information can be omitted, as it was in this particular case.
Family stories can sometimes be wrong as humans are not blessed with 100 percent recall and we can get things wrong, as it would seem this relative did in his writings for his children!
I hope that you won't make this mistake in your ancestor research and will use more than the one look-up site in your family tree search.