Are These Really My Ancestors? | The Barefoot Genealogist | Ancestry

hi everyone crystal Cohen here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today we are asking the question are these really my ancestors it is August the 15th 2018 I'm actually in Poland on vacation this week but I wanted to make sure I got this video out too you know this is for particularly for those of you who are brand new to ancestry but even if you've been on ancestry awhile there are some things you'll probably learn here and if you consider yourself an intermediate researcher there might be a thing or two for you in this video as well now the big question that we're gonna answer of course are these really my ancestors what happens is when you come on ancestry and you start building a family tree it's really easy to just start chasing those leaves or to just start and you know click clicking and climbing and we even use that phrase claiming your family tree as if it's this existing thing you just have to climb up it but one of the things that I've learned is that your family tree is a little bit more like a jigsaw puzzle where you don't have the box you have no idea what the completed picture is going to look like and there are all these pieces out there that you have to find and put together now just like in this image there are some that are already put together in little pieces or connections that have already been made by other people who may have come along before you but your tree is a little bit unique to you and your cousin is going to have a little bit of a different tree though there might be some branches that are the same so there's some overlap but there's also similar unique things to you and so when you come on ancestry and you start building your tree and it's a matter of finding the right pieces and putting them in the right places so that you can make the picture that is your family tree more complete with every piece that you add to it I appreciate that analogy a little bit better and maybe it's something that you can grasp onto as well well with that introduction let's go ahead and dive in and we're going to come over here to the website and just take a look so this is a screen that most of you should be familiar with when you start your family tree on ancestry you add yourself and your parents and your grandparents and you put in what you know about them and hopefully you've also talked to parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles and gotten some additional information about what they know about their parents and their grandparents and so you have not information into the tree and then you start to get these little leaves on ancestry and what those leaves are is that they're just ancestry saying that they have found some information either in a record or in someone else's family tree that they think matches some of the information that you've got here now we call them hints and one of the things that sometimes happen is people hear the word hint and they think it's like like ancestry has set up a scavenger hunt for you and we're giving you hints to get to the treasure at the end and that's a little different than how we mean the word hint and what we mean is we think we found a record or our computers did that matches what you put in your tree now there could be four men with the same name in the same time in the same place and so of course all of their information is going to match but you have to determine which one of those records that we show you is really for your person and so it requires you and to do a little bit of analytical thinking and to you know check the edges of the jigsaw puzzle piece as it works and make sure that it fits with the other things that you already know about your family history so and it's it's great that you have those leaves available I love them I use them all of the time and as an additional step recently ancestry started providing these potential mother and father hints now what those are is and just like the leaf hint that you get here it is just a hint and we're pulling that information from other people's family trees and from records again showing you right here on your pedigree chart what we think is a potential parent for this person No we allow you to review that information so I can click here and I can click review and it will show me who you know who the computer thinks might be the father of this individual it gives me some dates and places to review and then I can either say yes it is her father and it will add that information into my tree no it's not her father and then that potential father hint goes away or maybe it is I'm not sure and so it'll sit there until I collect additional information in order to decide so that's kind of how we use the hints and like I said I use them as well but once you've done that and that's a fun way to get started once you've done that you then need to make sure that you can go back and just review the information you've collected and see if it's accurate we want you climbing your family tree in somebody else's and so here are just a few questions that you can start to ask to review the information in your family tree to make sure if it's accurate because if it's inaccurate there's going to be a few different outcomes one you'll get you'll hit what we call a brick wall in genealogy you'll be looking and looking and looking for information about a person to see if you can take it back another generation and you won't be able to find anything well sometimes that's because the information you've already added to your tree is wrong and that means you're not gonna be able to go to the next step okay another thing that happens when we find incur put incorrect information into our family tree is that we end up climbing someone else's family tree maybe we attached the wrong set of parents and then we've got this whole great big tree but right down here our great grandparent level maybe it's wrong and if it's wrong then you've got all of these people in your tree that aren't really your people which might not be a big deal except for then reason number three which is the DNA if you've taken an ancestry DNA test your DNA matches won't make any sense you'll see people on your DNA match list and you'll think their information and their tree does not match the information in my tree how am I related to these people well it could be that the information in your tree is not accurate so I've just put together this little list to help you run through and just do some kind of a debt check on your tree the first thing is do the dates make sense what I mean by that is when you're in your tree and you just look at relationships between parents and children does it make sense that somebody born in 1826 can have a child in 1857 absolutely does it make sense that somebody born in 1858 can have a child born in 1891 absolutely okay so that's just a really basic level gut check I've seen plenty of trees where we have women who were two years old giving birth or women who were born in the 1800s giving birth to a child born in the 1700s not biologically possible so check the dates sometimes it's just that someone's entered a date wrong and we've copied it incorrectly sometimes it's us that entered it wrong sometimes you've grabbed the wrong person and put them into your tree so date checks are a really quick easy way to see if your information is plausible the next thing is to see if places make sense so again when you're looking at individual relationships in your tree if you've got somebody here born in Ireland died in Quebec Canada that makes sense right people were immigrating from Ireland to the Americas at that time okay then we're gonna look at his child and we're gonna see that this child was born in Quebec Canada as a matter of fact in the same place where that father died again that makes sense we start to see patterns of migration that families take and we see you know this guy born in Canada then migrates down into New Hampshire and that's where he dies and then you check the next generation and see that this individual was born in New Hampshire so that makes sense okay so again you're gonna check dates for fur and just a gut check or a sense check and then you're going to check and you're going to check places to see if they also make sense now and one of the things again that I sometimes see in trees is people will have like a child born you know the US and then a child born in England and then a child born in Australia and then another child born in England and the reality is that kind of a migration path when you're looking through a list of children especially when those children are just a year or two apart in the 1700s doesn't really make sense okay so make sure that the information about locations through the tree have some continuity and make sense with what you know about migration so that also means that you need to learn a little bit about migration and we'll talk about that in just a minute okay so you're gonna do a date check you're gonna do a place check and then can these two really important questions now if you have not yet heard of the genealogical proof standard I've done a whole series of videos about the genealogical proof standard and when you feel like you're ready for that if you go to the ancestry YouTube channel which is probably where you're watching this video there is a playlist called genealogical proof standard and there's an introductory video and then there's one video for each of the five steps I would encourage you to watch that even if you're brand new to family history it's kind of one of those mind-expanding moments where you can start to see that there's more to family history than then what you may have thought before and that's really exciting because I've discovered that the more I know how to do something the more fun it is to do it so so I'm a big fan of Education and some of that may go way over your head and be a lot of information but just dip your toe in those waters and see and see how you feel about it so these two questions are just the basic basic questions that we ask when we start looking at genealogical proof so the first one is what evidence do I have that this information in my tree is correct and then the second one is is there any evidence that's come up that this information might be incorrect okay now when we talk about evidence we're talking about all sorts of things we're talking about the stories your grandma told you we're talking about the family tree that your third cousin two times removed has online we're talking about census records and birth marriage and death records we're talking about DNA evidence we're talking about newspaper articles and family stories and your family Bible and any any evidence that you collect in this family history journey as you're learning more about these people in your family tree and does it does it correlate with the information you already know or does it contradict the information you already know and you have to be able to make sense of that so one of the things that we do on ancestry and we do this anytime we show you a record we give you the ability to attach that record or that piece of evidence directly into your tree here as a source and so you can see here I've got this 1900 census for the city family and when I click on that source it tells me that this piece of evidence or this piece of information provides evidence for this guy's birth date in place it provides evidence for when when and where he was living or where he was living in 1900 it provides an evidence for his name for his relationships with his spouse and children and and so that one document gives me all sorts of really great information that is then evidence that the information I'm putting in my tree is right now you can see here I didn't stop at one record I went in from every record I could about him so I've got him in a 1900 census in a 1920 census noticeably missing the 1910 census in 1830 I've got birth records and marriage and divorce records and you know like I've got all of these records that had collected and each one of those records provides a piece of evidence about this man in his life who he was and what he did and that's really what you're looking for is you're looking for what evidence exists that tells me about this person and who they were and is there any evidence anywhere that contradicts it and so if you come across a piece of evidence for example that's says that you know the father of Frank Dewey Hickey is Joseph Hickey and the mother is Abbie Turner that's great but if you then come across a second piece of evidence that says the father of Frank Dewey Hickey is Joseph Hickey and the mother is a woman named Margaret Anderson well now you've got some conflicting information you've got two different mothers named in two different kinds of records and so you have to then figure out which one of those is accurate look for additional evidence or additional information to help you come to a conclusion so that's just the basics of what we're doing here is we're just trying to find information out about people and their lives and their relationships and we're using documents and evidence and family stories and DNA and newspaper articles and any one of the other billions and billions of records that ancestry has available for you to do that so spend some time with that with those records it's great to chase those leaves it's great to just copy information from the tree of some cousin who may have already done a bunch of work but you want to make sure that their work is accurate and you want to make sure that you have the evidence and you know what I don't know about you but what I've found is when I start digging into the evidence that's where the story comes out and I don't just want to be able to fill in a big family tree I want to be able to understand the stories about these people and their lives so I'm going to use an example to teach this principal from my own family tree and hopefully this is useful to you and then we're gonna wrap up with a couple of quick tips that hopefully will be helpful to anybody whether you're a beginner or not so this is my great-great grandmother her name was Carrie Inman she married a Cowan that's my last name of course and she was my grandfather's grandmother and I was really close to my grandfather growing up and he loves telling stories and I loved listening to his stories and he unfortunately did not have very many stories about his grandmother so his grandmother what we knew about her was that she was born about 1860 in Ohio Ohio was where my grandfather's father was from several generations before that had lived in Ohio so really strong roots there and that's what he knew about her he also knew that she married his grandfather in 1884 also in Ohio as a matter of fact when I was a teenager when I was a young teenager my dad had to go to Ohio on a business trip and he actually went to the courthouse where and Cary Inman married park Cowan and got a copy of their marriage certificate because we wanted to know more about women so now we knew exactly where in Ohio they got married we had their exact marriage date unfortunately or well unfortunately she was 24 years old when she got married so she didn't require parental permission so there was no parents information at all on her marriage certificate and really we wanted to know more about her and about her life but part of that included understanding who her parents were and did she have brothers and sisters and we knew none of that my grandfather didn't know any of that because she had kind of a hard life so um when her youngest son who's my great-grandfather when her youngest son was about 10 years old her husband left her with these two children and took off for California and so she immediately went to work and raised these two boys all on her own one of them joined the Merchant Marines another one joined the US Army my great-grandfather and he actually was stationed in Texas when he met my great-grandmother then he got shipped off to Europe for World War one and then when he came home he was stationed in San Francisco with his family and at the time my grandfather was born in San Francisco while his father was stationed there and my grandfather's uncle so the older of the two sons of Cary he had been married and he had been in the Merchant Marines he'd been stationed in New Orleans and he met a woman there and he brought her back to Ohio they'd had four little girls they'd moved around with his work but then he pulled the same stunt that his father did and he took off and left his wife with these children and she was originally from New Orleans and so she wanted to go home to New Orleans and so Carrie who was her mother-in-law volunteered to go back to New Orleans and to go to New Orleans and to help raise these four little girls so she raised her two sons as a single mom and now she is helping her her daughter-in-law heard that she's still her daughter alive even though their ex she's helping her raise her four little girls and and so my grandfather who grew up out in California and you know he never got to know his grandmother he met her twice in his life and so when I'd asked him about her he just didn't know very much he never had any photographs as a matter of fact I found this photograph years later and he always wanted to know what had happened to her what her life had been like and you know who she was from who were her people he did tell me that she died in New Orleans and while he was serving in World War two and so he had received that news and never had the opportunity to see her again so this woman became my obsession I started looking into every inman family in Ohio now of course when I started doing this I was a teenager and that was before all the census records were online and so my dad would bring me to Salt Lake City to the family history library and I would scroll through microfilm of Sons records looking for her and looking to see what I could find out about her and I actually never solved who her parents were while I was in high school and then I kind of put it on the back burner for a little while and when I was in my 20s I wrote away to the city of New Orleans to get a copy of her death certificate because I thought that would have the information that I needed well first off they said they took my money for the search and the certificate wrote me back and said they had no record of a death of a carrion man or a Kari Cowan and I was devastated because I thought that was my last chance I I looked for the the granddaughter she helped raise I looked for I mean I did all sorts of things trying to find this woman eventually I did find on ancestry the New Orleans Death Index and found a record of her and so I sent away again to the city of New Orleans this time with the index information and I said she died here on this date here's the information I want a copy of the certificate had to pay again they sent me a copy of her certificate and in the space on the death certificate where you list the parents names it said don't know and don't know because the informant on the death certificate was one of her granddaughters who had never known who her parents were and so again I thought I'm never gonna find this in me so I went looking again in the census now I'm just gonna do a little bit of a recreation here let me close this here's my family tree okay so if Carrie was born in 1860 and she died in 1884 again you have to start looking at dates I was born in 1860 married in 1884 I should be able to find her in the 1880 census as a 20-ish year-old woman probably living in Ohio since I know she was born in Ohio and married there now over time I've heard her name as Carrie or Caroline and so I'm going to use a wild card on ancestry and one of the wild cards you can use is an asterisk Sona but see AR asterisk and that will catch all of those variations now her last name is spelled pretty consistently in every record I've ever seen sometimes it's got a double n in the middle there inma n but for the purposes of this search I'm just gonna put an M in and I'm just gonna click search now this is a really important thing that sometimes some of you do you'll notice here I am only searching the 1880 census I'm not searching all 22 billion records on ancestry I was looking specifically for her in a very specific records and that was the 1880 census so I just went straight to that database the second thing you'll notice is that the only two pieces of information I'm filling in our first name and a last name even though there's always other prettyboy field I don't have to fill them in and so I'm just gonna click search and see what happens that is a great way to start to understand if the people that you're looking for have a common name or an uncommon name or you know if there's going to be a lot of different spelling variations and where in the world these people are so that when you do start to hone in on somebody you have more confidence that you found the right person so in this case with nothing but a name searching the entire United States for the 1880 census there are 44 people with a name of Cary or Caroline Inman and I can just scroll through this very quickly you know some of them are Carlos I bet Carter right because remember all I asked for was anybody whose name starts with C AR so I'm just gonna click Edit search and I'm going to add one more piece of information the other piece of information we were super confident about was that she was born in Ohio and so I click that and I click search again and now I've gone from 44 people down to 8 so now I've got 8 people born in Ohio named Kerry Inman now I know she was born in about 1860 that's what that's what her marriage record told us that's what the censuses we found after her marriage in 1900 and 10 and 20 of her as a wife and a mother show and sometimes they say you know give us a birth year of 1861 or 62 and census records are notoriously you know off by a year or two I had an exact birth date from her death certificate but that's only as accurate as the person who gave the information so that's at 1861 so what I'm gonna do because I've got all these different birth dates possibly within a little range is I'm gonna put in 1860 and I'm gonna make that plus or minus five years that way you know if she became an old woman and decided she wanted to be ten years younger or five years younger I've still accounted for some of that so now I'm gonna go ahead and click search and I end up with just three so three people named Kerry Inman born in about 1860 give or take in Ohio now how do I decide which one it is that that becomes the tricky part right well here I have a young woman who is living with her parents Cyrus and Clement Inman and her last name is listed as parent now she's only 15 years old but she's listed as widowed and her last name is listed as parent so she got married young obviously her husband died and she moved back in with her parents and her last name his parents that's funny um and so we hear what we have is this woman who was married could this be my Carrie could she have been married before and then she doesn't get married again till she's 24 possibly so certainly could be her worth looking into this second one here she is actually single she is living in someone else's households of not family members she's listed as a servant in the household and her occupation is listed as dressmaker she's born in about 1861 so my age in Ohio interestingly enough she's living in the exact same town as this other Carrie and then this third one is living in the same county so we've got three women's same name same age living in the same County okay and this one the interesting thing about her is she is living with her grandparents she's listed as a granddaughter in the census and there are some other children of this couple and another grandchild of this couple living in this household now this woman has the middle initial a which has come up repeatedly on my great-great-grandmother's other records so that might be a clue but we had heard that one of the ways she supported herself and her children and her grandchildren was as a dressmaker so that could be her but we also knew that she never really talked about her life to anybody and so maybe it was because she'd had this really hard thing happened to her or her husband had died and that's why she never wanted to talk about it so we have these three possibilities you know I spent a long time looking into these people I searched out this Isaac and Sally and then I tried to find their children I managed to find all of their children I looked to see if I could find who their children's children were to see if you know there was any connection because what I'm trying to do is connect the dots here what I did discover was that this young woman Carrie Inman who married a parent was subsequently widowed she actually remarried and moved to Michigan and then ultimately I think she ended up in California so I was able to rule her out so it wasn't her so then I was left with these two and ultimately what I was able to figure out through a series of other records was that these two women on this 1880 census are actually the same woman she was enumerated twice once in the household of the people who she worked for and once in the household of her grandparents so now I have a set of grandparents for her and that's really exciting because I'm trying to like I said figure out who these people are in my family tree so I knew that Isaac and Sally were her grandparents now here's where things get kind of tricky there is no record that exists anywhere that I have found yet that lists the names of carries parents nowhere what I do have is a list of the children of Isaac Inman and Sally Anne Marsh and they only had one son and so if she is an Inman by birth and by legitimate birth meaning born to two people who are married and taking her father's name which was tradition for that location and time period then their one son has to be her father and I was able to find a record of the marriage of Joseph to a woman named Mary Beeman now it is possible that Carrie could be the daughter of one of the daughters of Isaac and Sally who was just unmarried and so she took her mother's Mae name but I have no evidence of that and so I took what I had right and I put them in her the tree as her parents and I started doing some additional research now since then I now have some genetic evidence through my DNA matches that Mary Beeman is in fact the mother of Kerry Inman so as little pieces of evidence come in I start to put the puzzle pieces together and now all of a sudden I have a picture of who this woman is and what her life was like now unfortunately my grandfather passed away and sorry that made me a little bit emotional just to say that out loud and he passed away before I was able to find this information and that kind of broke my heart a little bit because like I said he used to tell me about her and he too asked me to find her and I'd look and my dad never go to Salt Lake Ann we'd search and my dad would go on business trips and search and I would right away to record offices and we did what we could but it wasn't until I had all of these pieces of records available at my fingertips over the course of the last few years that I've been able to put together the story of her life and I've since found newspaper articles about her divorce and I found that I found those four daughters and her four granddaughters in New Orleans and I've spent time with their daughters and sons and grandchildren and God's know even more about her story I've inherited photographs of her I probably have a half dozen or so now and and all because I just really carefully had to put together the pieces of the puzzle and that's how it's going to be sometimes sometimes it's gonna come together really easy and sometimes it's gonna take a little bit more time so when it comes to your family tree let me just wrap up with these last few tips so I did say this but I wanted to say it again there will always be a record that states an exact date or an exact relationship sometimes the best you're gonna get is a series of census records that lists an approximate age and you're gonna have to put in your tree that this person was born about 1861 and that's as good as it's gonna get because there's no a birth record and their tombstone has a different date on it the census record and the military record for their age so you just you do the best you can with all the little pieces of evidence that you collect sometimes you will not find a record that states an exact relationship in the case of Kerry I still to this day do not have a record that says she is the daughter of these two people I do have an old compiled family history that I found where somebody says that and I'm hoping that that's accurate but now that I've put together the other pieces of evidence he's their only son I've got genetic connections to the Beaman family I feel pretty good about my conclusion but sometimes you have to put those pieces together in the genealogical proof standard we call that indirect evidence and when you amass enough of it you can come to a conclusion the other thing that I would encourage you to do is to really get curious about the people in your tree get curious about their lives and their relationships it's really easy to get caught up in the you know least clicking and it's fun I have a genealogy colleague who says if genealogy isn't fun you're doing it wrong and I believe that it's a lot of fun to chase the leaves and to see where different lines take you but I have found the most meaning when I get really curious about these people and I just dig deep to see every possible record I can find about their life every census every newspaper article every military record every passenger list and naturalization paper and every birth of child you know however many children they had I want to know all of it because I want to know about who these people were for me it's not just about climbing a family tree it's about coming to know my ancestors and who they were and why they made the choices that they made sometimes that means you also have to get curious about places so this Spencer or Medina County Ohio I've become really curious about it as a matter of fact I went on a business trip to Ohio and I took the time to stay an extra day and drive to Medina County and I visited the library and looked at the genealogy section and I went to the cemetery and walked the stones and became familiar with all of the people who lived there and the CERN and and when I've come to find out since then is that I was related to most of those people and because you've got six or eight families that intermarry over the course of two or three generations and you end up related to half a town and I also wanted to understand a little bit more about why this place why my ancestors came from where they came from to this place was there something about the crops that grew there or the business that opened in the industry that was available was at some particular skill that they had when they brought there were they forced there I want to understand all of those things and that being curious about places really helps me do that again it also helps me make sure I'm climbing my family tree and not someone else's because there are sometimes generalizations about a place that we can make that can help us understand a little bit more about well maybe this was a settlement of people from Ireland and this was a settlement of people from Poland and so if your people from Ireland it's more likely they were here than that they were here and that's true when you start talking about for example Native Americans understanding what tribes lived where at what time will help you make sure that if you have Native American history in your tree that you're looking at the right people you can't say you're Cherokee but that your family was from North Dakota because the Cherokee weren't there so lots of different things about places and just you know do a quick internet search and learn more about that particular place it'll help make your family tree more accurate and then just because something seems right doesn't mean that it is right it's like I said really easy to just click click click copy copy copy and really fun and really fast but sometimes that information is not accurate and so our job or our fun is to find the records and all the little pieces of evidence all the little pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and put them together to build this picture of our family tree and then to learn as much as we can about those people so hopefully for those of you who are near to family history this was and a little bit i opening and a little bit encouraging for you as you start to build your family tree and make new discoveries about who they were and what that means for who you are for those have you been doing family history or have been with us here at ancestry for a while hopefully that was useful and there was some new tips or some new tricks there that you learned but for all of you I just hope that you have fun and you just have fun climbing your own family tree until next time this is Christy Cohen [Music]

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 166,502

Keywords: ancestry.com ancestry family tree family history genealogy, ancestrydna, ancestry, genealogy, finding your roots, family tree now, best dna test, dna test, dna results, surname, family tree, ancestry dna, ancestors, family search, dna ancestry test, dna discovery, dna testing, genetic testing, dna testing kit, dna kit, dna tests, dna kits, dna genetics, dna test kits, dna analysis, genetics test, ancestry com, chasing, leaf hints, Crista Cowan, Barefoot Genealogist

Id: YxAZ8NgCk1k

Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 15 2018