Descendancy Research | Ancestry

hi everyone Christian here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today we are talking about descendancy research i'm not going to give too much of an introduction because we've got a lot to cover and i wanted to actually give you a few visuals of exactly what descendency research is i'll share with you some of the tips and tricks that I use when I do descendency research and then some of the places you can go to make sure that you can do it as well and keep track of everything as you go so with that brief introduction let's go ahead and dive in let's first just talk about what descendency research is in in traditional genealogy or ancestry research you start with yourself and you work backwards one generation at a time you start with what you know about yourself and then you put in what you know about your parents your grandparents your great-grandparents and you discover information as you go I hope you'll you're also not just doing or including information about the people on this pedigree I hope you're also including information about siblings your parents siblings your grandparents siblings and so on anytime you do that it's going to help you go back another generation so for example your grandfather's death certificate might not list his mother's maiden name but his sister's death certificate might and so that's why it's always really important to trace siblings as well now that's traditional ancestry research you work your way back a generation at a time in descendancy research you pick an ancestor and you trace all of that ancestors descendants so their children their grandchildren their great-grandchildren and so on in this case you are one of those people in that line so for example this is a let's see up Eternals father's a looks like a paternal grandmother's line that gets you up to this common ancestor here and so you have these other people included so you're tracing not just the siblings of your ancestor but you're also tracing their children as well and so you end up with lots of second and third and fourth cousins now there are a lot of reasons why you would want to do descendancy research to this level everybody has their own reasons for me the very first descendancy research project I started it started with just a curiosity I had a third great-grandfather who I was particularly interested in I wanted to know more about him in his life and had studied a lot actually enough gathered enough information to write a biography about him and I wanted to see what had happened to his descendants where they had ended up in the world he was just this incredible man and I had learned so much about him and I wanted to see what traits of his had been passed on down through the family and so I started with his eighteen children his 98 grandchildren and just kind of it grew from there he was born about 205 years ago now and we're up to about 86 87 hundred descendants of this one man just born a couple hundred years ago and it's been really interesting to see the different traits that have been passed down through the different branches of the family also it's been interesting to see the different pieces of information that have been passed down through the family some members of the family have photos that none of the rest of us had ever seen until we started contacting each other one member of the family had actually inherited through her branch of the family the tea set that this great-grandfather's first wife had brought over with them from Scotland when they emigrated to Canada so lots of different reasons why you want to do descendancy research sometimes it's just a matter of collecting those cousins and making those connections sometimes it's to honor that particular ancestor to see what has happened to their legacy over time sometimes it's because connecting with some of those cousins can actually help you with real ancestry research as you realize that different branches of the family have inherited different pieces of information over time and so lots of other but those are some of the main reasons why I do descendancy research and a brief description of what it is and so let's talk about then the how the first thing you need to know is that you need to just focus that seems to be a challenge all of us have we all have a little bit of genealogy ad D where we tend to to just follow the leaves or the hints wherever they take us and sometimes we end up down a rabbit hole and working on families that aren't even a horse this is a really methodical approach to family history which is another reason why I love it so you'll pick one ancestor or one ancestral couple and focus on them you're going to start with that one couple so in my case I'm working on a project right now for an ancestor of mine who was an early Quaker in New Jersey and I'm trying to identify all of his descendants and so I've picked that one couple so then you're going to identify everything you know about that one family unit that ancestral couple and their children and just like ancestral research you're going to collect every piece of information you can about an individual and their immediate family before you move on to the next generation it's very easy to find one census or to find one death certificate and think we've got the information we need we're going to move on but the reality is if you've been doing this for any length of time you know no single piece of information or no single document is always a hundred percent accurate census records often have errors birth and death certificates often have errors tombstones often have errors even just because it's carved in stone doesn't make it fact but when you collect all of those pieces of information in concert you are usually able to resolve some of that conflicting evidence and come to some conclusions and so make sure you collect every census and every certificate that's available and every marriage record and every cemetery record and anything that you can find every military record anything you can find about a family group and look at that information all together before you draw some final conclusions and before you move on to the next generation and then have a system for keeping track of where you are at in your family so I'll just show you my simple system so here is this is a sixth great-grandfather and grandmother of mine you'll notice here I have a line where her maiden name should be and that's because I have some conflicting evidence about what her maiden name is and I'm still trying to resolve some of that and look for some more information but I've identified that this couple had four children and now I have just started working my way through their children and so I'll work I'll start with the first child and I'll work my way all the way down through their descendants and then I'll start with the oldest child of that person and then the oldest child of that person and I'll just work my way one generation at a time so in the case of this particular family I've worked my way down several generations here through this family and now I am you know finally here at this person and this is where I need to pick up my research because we all know this is not a one sitting kind of an event and so I need to be able to keep track of who I was working on last so in family tree maker one of the tools that we have available to us is a bookmark so I can just right-click on this person's name and I've already set it let me just there we go I can add bookmark and what that does is over here in my index panel I have this bookmark feature down here I can just click on that and it will bring up the list of people that I have bookmarked in my tree and there she is she's she's been bookmarked so I know when I come back to my research this is the person I need to start with and because I'm doing these children in order once I'm finished with Blanche and her family then I would move on to imaging in her family and then once I'm finished with imaging because she's the last child in this family I just go back a generation and Charlotte is the next child after Elizabeth and I'd move on with her children and so on and so that's how I keep track of how I do that as I use the bookmark feature in Family Tree Maker you can do something as simple as opposed to code on your computer screen if that works for you but just have some kind of a system for keeping track of where you're at in the family and if you do it systematically oldest to youngest child then you'll always know when you backup a generation who the next child is to pick up now just like an ancestry research you want to make sure that you document things as you go documentation of documenting what you find is probably one of the best ways to keep your sanity who in doing genealogy research of any kind you're going to use the same kinds of records that you use in ancestry research census records and vital records vital records being birth marriage and death records newspapers military records immigration family and local histories old published family histories all of us in kinds of records the only difference is that you're coming down instead of going back so when you do ancestral research you're starting with yourself you're working your way backwards your parents your grandparents and very often when you first get started in family history research doing it that way you have some of those people still available to talk to your parents your grandparents maybe some aunts and uncles and cousins you have people you can talk to about those living people well when you're doing descendancy research sometimes you're discovering third and fourth and fifth cousins and you may not have any contact with them and one of the challenges that we have is we hit what we call the 1940 wall the 1940 census is the most recently available public census here in the United States census records are private for 72 years before they're released by the government so the 1940 census is the last one we have available so how do you discover more about if you if you find a family on the 1940 census how do you learn if they have more children how do you learn who those girls in that family married and so finding living people to whom you have no immediate connection is a little bit trickier and so here are just some of the resources that I use to do that the first one and probably the most important one is obituaries you can search locally or on Google for obituaries you can search ancestry.com for obituaries if you come to the card catalog and you can just type in the word obituary and it will show you that ancestry.com has at a United States obituary collection that that has twenty eight and a half million records in that particular collection and most of those records are fairly new what we do with this collection is ancestry actually goes through and just mark that exact and pull up an example ancestry actually goes through the internet and crawls or we do a web crawl for obituaries that are being published by organizations out on the internet and so we get the information from that obituary and we index it and then we give you a link out to that index if we if it still exists out on the internet so you can see some of these are very recent and ancestry crawls these on a fairly regular basis and so you know here's one from February of this year I might be able to find some more recent ones if I really looked sometimes you'll see several obituaries for the same person here are three for this allas shin sometimes it's because the newspaper printed it on several days sometimes it's because it was printed in several different newspapers always check every instance of that obituary sometimes it's just a death notice one day and then a full of actually the next day and then the family noticed some errors so there were some Corrections made on the third day and so always check all of the different variations sometimes if it's a single obituary printed across three or four different newspapers sometimes different newspapers have different requirements or different allotments for space and so you may find it a more complete obituary in one version versus another that may have had to cut some text and so anytime you see multiple instances here's another one one two three four five copies of a single obituary always make sure you look at all of them to make sure you've got the most complete information now any time you do this it you're going to see here this little link that says view full obituary that's what you're going to want to click on to take you out to the Internet to wherever the web page is in this case it's the mountain Democrat which is apparently California's oldest newspaper where this obituary was published okay and so it's going to take you out to somewhere else online ancestry has just crawled or indexed these automatically with a computer to pull some of that information and one of the reasons why obituaries is are so great the first one is here you see a woman she's listed by two names evelyn loretta dunlop and evelyn loretta shin well shin is her maiden name and that information was pulled because her parents are listed in her obituary and Dunlap is her married name so if you didn't know who this woman married you would still probably be able to find this particular obituary searching by her maiden name so wherever both are in existence or the computer can tell which ones which we include both so that you can search by both this obituary will also include information very often about her family her children maybe some of her grandchildren oftentimes it will list where those people lived as well and that brings us to this next resource here for finding living people which is the public records index if you found an obituary that says that you know John Smith who is the son of you know Frank Smith who just died lived in you know placer California then you can come to this public records index and you can actually look for somebody by that name who is living in that place they'll help you narrow down some of those search results and it's called the public records index public work public record or records I can't ever remember his records okay public records index there is volume 1 and volume 2 they both have more than four hundred million records in the in the two of them if you read the database descriptions you'll find out some of the subtle differences but here's just an example of how I might search that particular thing at that particular database I'll put in the name of the person I'm looking for now in this case I'm going to mark it exact because I'm dealing with current records so they're more likely to be spelled correctly than old census records or you know whatever and so I'm going to mark all fields exact here and I'm going to go ahead and click search I all I put in was a name I've got 18 search results and now you know if I know from his mother's obituary that he lived in a particular location I can then go through and look for that location here one of the things you're going to notice about the public public records indexes that it very often will include birth dates of living people as a matter of fact you'll probably be able to locate yourself in here these records come from old phone books old voter registration and old property records and so very often your birth date is attached to that and that is considered public information you might also discover that you're listed two or three times sometimes with old addresses this database I believe covers 1950 to 1993 and so if you lived in several places over that time period you may see yourself listed with several different addresses so this is public records indexed Volume one now if I wanted to check Volume two without editing my search at all right I don't want to change any of the search parameters I just want to check volume two I'm going to use these little breadcrumb links over here on the left just click on one of those and now I've got search results here where I can jump directly to public records indexed volume 2 or US city directories up through 1989 or California city directories I've got lots of resources here available to me to look for the particular person or people I'm interested in now once you find a person that you you know this is the person maybe that was listed in the obituary then make note of that address this person happens to live on Claire View San Francisco 81 clear view court in San Francisco so then I can come in here and I can edit the search and what I want to do is look for anybody with that last name who is living I'm going to go ahead and type in San Francisco select it from the type-ahead remember I've got this marked as exact and then I'm going to come down here to the keyword field and I think it was clear view I'm going to type in the name of the street and click search and that will show me if anybody else with that last name lives at that same address in this case it doesn't look like they do but every once in a while you'll end up with a spouse and maybe some some older children in that family as well so that's a really great way the public records index to find living people and to be able to connect with them I'll then take that information a lot of times and I'll go to white pages calm the public records indexes old addresses and phone numbers but if you go to white pages com that's current addresses and phone numbers and so I'll look up that person see if they're still living at that address a lot of times they are sometimes with the information I've collected I'll go to Facebook one of the things you can do in facebook is you can do a search for people named and then the name of whoever it is that you're looking for and if you happen to know where they live if they live in San Francisco or if they you know live in New Jersey or wherever you can quickly look through that list of people and find them now of course on Facebook if you have somebody with a very common name it's going to be a little bit more difficult so one of the search queries you can do there is people named John Smith who live in California and then it will show you a subset or a smaller list and one of the ways you can tell if you've got the right person on Facebook is by looking at their friends list you know if you've looked up a person in the family with a little bit more unique name and then you look at their friends list you can often see that they have this the right siblings or you can see if you know they have friends on their list that have the same maiden name as their mother lots of different easy ways to tell whether or not you've got the right person now as you're collecting all of this information make sure you cite your sources and keep good notes you can attach those records let's take it over here to my my family tree maker you can attach those records but also just make sure that you keep track of what you found and what you haven't found in this case I'm working on this family I've only found some census records so far that tells me that I still need to go look for a death record for her possibly a cemetery record if I can locate that maybe an obituary in a local newspaper there in New Jersey so lots of different things I need to locate her marriage record lots of records still missing here and I can tell that just at a glance because I have made notes about every record I found as well as just attaching that record it's just a quick at a glance way to tell what I've discovered what I haven't what I still need to look for okay so keep good notes keep track of what you found make notes about negative findings as well so for example if I've searched the public records index for the children listed in an obituary and I you know couldn't find one of them I would make a note that I had done that so that I knew that I was looking for you know where I had looked and where I hadn't found information so I don't keep repeating my search and I know you've all done that where you repeat your search over and over sometimes and you think this is so familiar I think I've looked through all of these search results before but if you keep notes of those negative findings it will help you a little bit now one of the unique things about a descendancy research as compared to ancestry research when you're doing ancestry research you know you're always looking for two parents no matter what you're always looking for a father and a mother and that make that's a little comforting because you know there's information or hope there's information out there somewhere about two people that you know existed however when you're doing descendancy research you don't know if these people exist or not you don't know if they had children you don't know if those children had children or got married even and so everyone has parents but not everyone has children or got married so make sure you note anytime you come to the end of a line and I've just done a really simple thing I used a just a basic image creation software like a actually I use PowerPoint and then created an image out of that and I have these three icons that I use let me just make them a little bit bigger for you here so that you can see what I'm talking about this one just says died young never married never had children the next one says married come down to this next one here scroll up a little married no children so I know that this person got married but didn't have any children and then this one says never married no children okay I just will add those for example um as a the profile picture for a person and that just really quickly tells me at a glance that um that I don't have to keep doing research you know that I don't have to keep looking for children or that I don't have to keep looking for a spouse for this person because I have found evidence that suggests that they never married or never had children or that they did marry but never had children so a really easy way to do that I've just created these images I just attach the same image to I mean I have the same image attached to hundreds of people in my database right I don't read the same image 100 times I just grab the same image every time out of my media file and attach it to whichever person it is that I'm working on so you figure out what system works for you I also will make a note for example I would come in here to my notes if I knew that this person didn't have any children and I would write end-of-line never married no children and then I would know when I came back and looked at these notes what was happening and if that was the case so just make sure you make a note otherwise again you'll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what you missed and and a redoing research that doesn't need to be done and then the final step in in some of the descendancy research and this is just kind of a bonus step but make yourself findable put your tree online at ancestry.com I call my online tree cousin fishing and that's what it is like I put it out there and it's public and people can find me and people take stuff from my tree and I can see that they've taken stuff from my tree and so I contact them when other people contact me I try to respond in a timely manner but I always respond something it just takes me a little bit of time but put your tree online respond when people contact you think about starting a blog or starting a Facebook page I have several Facebook pages that I have created for specific ancestors so that third great-grandfather for example that I talked about at the beginning those 8,700 descendants we've discovered I've started a Facebook page not a personal profile it's not another Facebook profile it's just a page like a business page or those pages that you like I started a Facebook page for that particular ancestor and then just started inviting cousins as I found them online to come join us on that page it's a place to congregate to see who's connected to share information as I discover it it's also the benefit of a Facebook page is that it shows up really high in search rankings when people are doing Google or Yahoo are being searches and so another way to make yourself found is to do that the other things you can do is oh let's come back here create a form letter that introduces yourself and explains how you think you're related to the person that you're contacting so I just have a basic form letter it says you know hi are you the granddaughter of you know so-and-so if so we're cousins you don't have to friend me you know if I'm sending it on Facebook or you know if I'm sending it through ancestry here's the link to my tree you come check out what I've learned or discovered already about this common grandfather of ours and just make a really basic form letter that way you can just copy and paste it anytime you want to contact any man and then the the key I've discovered to good genealogy karma is to be willing to share and expect nothing in return now that doesn't mean that you won't get anything in return I have found that I have received treasures from some of these contacts but the attitude with which I share sometimes is what determines whether or not people are willing to share information back with me and so I have to just be willing to share and expect nothing in return I am just sharing information with these found cousins for the sheer joy of connecting them with their heritage and hopefully sparking more interest in them for this particular branch of our shared family history and I found a lot of success just making that simple attitude adjustment and it wasn't adjustment for me but but it has worked really really well so quick review because we're running a little long in time here I think focus you pick one ancestor or one ancestor or a couple and focus on them and then methodically go generation by generation collecting all the information you can about a single family and then working your way down one branch to that family at a time document as you go so you can keep track of what you found what you haven't found and what still needs some more research and so that you know where you're at and then reach out and contact those cousins be willing to make some of those connections on Facebook and start a blog make your tree public create some ways to contact people to share that information with them descendancy research is a lot of fun I have made some lifelong friends making some of these connections I've also discovered like I said that there are some treasures that have been passed down in some of these families and some of the people who hold these treasures have had no previous interest in family history until I have contacted them and so my contact is sometimes the spark that they need to get interested in family history and then to remember oh yeah I have that box of pictures in the attic that you know my grandmother gave me 30 years ago or I have the family Bible it's been tucked away in our you know safe-deposit box and we didn't know if anybody wanted it or what to do with it because they'd never thought of it before and so my contact is sometimes the thing that spurs that one branch of the family to to get interested in family history or to share the things that they've discovered very often we think about our ancestors as our ancestors and they are I feel a lot of connection and ownership to my ancestors but just like that one single third great-grandfather of mine he has 8700 sentence and he belongs to all 8700 of them - and you never know what what little treasure has been passed down in one of those families and so it's exciting to think about the different traits that different people have discovered in our family I'll just close with this story in that particular family as we started contacting some of these cousins on Facebook we noticed a really really high incidence of red hair and so I ran a little survey and it turns out that a very very small population it's like 7% or 8% or something of the general population has red hair but in this particular family more than 35% of the descendants in this family have red hair and that was just a fun little survey that we ran with all the cousins that we've collected on our Facebook page and lots of other different things you can do to discover what traits have been passed down in your families and to honor some of those ancestors that we feel particularly close to so I hope this was useful and that you've enjoyed maybe a little bit of a different perspective on jenny ology in this case descendency research if you have any questions if you're watching this at our regularly scheduled time i will be on chat immediately following the presentation and can answer any of the questions that you might have if you're watching this on youtube go ahead and just leave a comment I will monitor those and respond as necessary until next time this is Christa Cowan have fun climbing your family dream

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 32,726

Rating: 4.9388647 out of 5

Keywords: ancestry.com, ancestry, family tree, family history, genealogy, Barefoot Genealogist, descendants, TBG

Id: _q7yAh8Anok

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 09 2014