At some point in your ancestry searches you are going to hit a brick wall. Even the most experienced genealogists will have difficulty tracing a particular ancestor at some point. While it is not always possible to get beyond this sticking point, there are several things you should do that can provide that essential chink in the wall that can help you in finding an elusive ancestor and breaking through to the next generation.
The most frustrating situation is where you have an ancestor with a common name, and do not have a specific area of origin. Unless you can gather more information from other sources, this is always going to be the worst scenario. A “John Smith of England”, born about 1827″ is not going to get you anywhere!
All the same, even if you have a definite place of birth, and/or an uncommon name, there are some ancestors who just don’t seem to want to be found!
Here are a few tips that have helped me get past many a sticking point in the past, both for myself and for my clients:
- Siblings can be very useful in tracking an elusive ancestor. Brothers and sisters of the person you are searching may be found on census records or may be witnesses to a wedding. If you are unable to find your direct ancestor, then try searching for their brothers and sisters, not only back in time, but forward in time. You could find that your missing ancestor was living with a brother or sister, and the name has been badly transcribed therefore not turning up in index searches. If you can’t find a baptism for your missing ancestor, then try looking for the baptism or birth record of their siblings.
- Witnesses on marriage certificates – even if they don’t look like siblings – could be useful. Try finding them on the census and working out how they are related to the subject. Sometimes witnesses are church officials, but often they are relatives or friends of the people getting married. A female with a different surname may be a married sister, or they could be nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts or cousins. Researching these people could provide you with clues as to where your ancestor was living or where he came from.
- Relatives and Visitors on the census should also be noted and researched. Any extended relation who is living in the household on the census should be thoroughly researched. Sometimes widowed parents-in-law lived with their married children, as did unmarried brothers or sisters. Visitors and boarders are not always un-related and quite often turn out to be relatives by marriage, so should also be checked out.
- Phonetic searches are not always reliable, so don’t rely on your search engine to come up with every possible variation of a surname spelling. Try as many different spellings of the surname as you can think of . Think of how a surname might sound (could that “n” sound like an “m”?) – or how it might look when written down. Not only were name spellings not standardized, modern transcribers make many errors when writing the indexes, so use your imagination when searching and keep trying different spellings.
- Search Engines in many genealogical websites can have very useful search criterias, and you can try searching with all kinds of different information to try and locate your ancestor. If your ancestor’s name is fairly uncommon, and you are fairly confident you know where they came from, you can try searching for a Christian name without surname, or vice versa, using the place name as an exact search. I found my own grandfather this way – his name was Francis Manley, but I could never find him in the 1881 census. When I tried searching for Manley without the Christian name, with a definite year and place, I found his name had been written as “Fracis” – which never came up in the index search!
- Military or Maritime ancestors might have been away during the census, so if you think your ancestor might have been a sailor or involved in overseas military campaigns, this could be why he does not show up on a census. Some military and shipping records can be seen online at the National Archives Website Documents Online Service. Other records of this nature can only be seen by visiting the National Archives at Kew, but you can still search some indexes online.
- Baptisms & Marriage Records of the parish registers can be useful if you are unable to find a birth or marriage certificate. Of course, you need to know where they were likely to have been born or married. Only a few parish registers are online at present, so you will either need to visit the relevant county record office, or hire someone to do this for you.
- Wills can be very useful if you cannot find an ancestor in the parish registers or other records. If your ancestor was fairly wealthy, and held property in more than one county, he is likely to have left a PCC (Perogative Court of Canterbury) will, which can be downloaded at the National Archives Documents Online website. However, if he only had property in one small area, it is more likely to be an archdeaconry will – and you will need to have an idea of where he was living when he died. It is always worth looking for wills of possible relatives of your ancestor – as they may mention him or her in their will, and this can help you establish parentage and origins. Looking for wills can be time consuming and sometimes expensive – but if you do find a will, they are well worth the search as they provide very interesting information about our ancestors’ lives.
- Land records can also be useful if you have an idea of where your ancestor lived. Sometimes these can provide family information if, say, an ancestor was passing a piece of land to a son, or transferred land as part of a dowry, for example.
- Ancestry.co.uk allows you to make a general search at the bottom of their home page, and if you have come to a full stop this search engine can be very useful for finding any other possible sources of information and documents. I have on occasion come across baptism records and criminal records for clients’ ancestors that I had not found before.
- Know Your History! Having a bit of knowledge about the history of the time can help you to understand your ancestors’ possible movements and his possible actions. For example, a factory worker in mid-19th century Manchester or Liverpool could be an Irish immigrant. If your ancestor worked as a gardener, he may have worked on one of the large private country house estates, and there could be local land records showing employees and salaries.
Remember that every single piece of information you have about your ancestor is a potential clue. Never dismiss anything, and always follow up every bit of information you have. It may lead to a dead end, but it could also lead to a real breakthrough.
Some of these tips will be more useful than others, depending on how much you already know about your ancestor, and what kind of person he was (e.g. a factory worker is unlikely to have left a will – though you should never rule this out).
My overall advice is to never give up and to keep looking. Sometimes, if you really are completely stuck, it is a good idea to leave it and work on another line for a while. Often, when you come back to this ancestor, you will have a new idea for how to go about your research – or more information may have become available online. More and more information is being published on the internet, so it’s always worth checking what’s available every so often.
Find an elusive ancestor can be frustrating, hard work and ultimately disappointing – but on the other hand, when you do make that breakthrough it is so exciting that it will have been worth all that hard work.
Happy hunting!
