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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: BourneGooner on Thursday 11 April 19 07:55 BST (UK)
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Hi All
How many times can you re-write your tree????
Just when you think you've got a person in your tree signed off, hatched, matched and dispatched etc. you find a document that throws it all up in the air and you have to start again.........
Example......I have a John Lock, baptized buried etc. etc. , then there's an Elizabeth Lock buried in the same church yard a year earlier than Johns burial as w/o John Lock. There is only the one John Lock I've come across so far so it has to be him (at least I thought it did :()
Now I find a Intestate document on the National Archives website for John Lock stating he is parent less and a bachelor. Bachelor HUH from the burial records for Elizabeth I had him married. Although I never have been able to find a record for the marriage.
Ah well back to the drawing board - re-write the tree try and try and figure this one out.....
I guess if this genealogy lark was easy it would be as much fun or interesting.
BourneGooner
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I wouldn’t call it rewriting my tree, but I have had to get the lopping shears out and prune a branch on a few occasions. I revisit my findings on a regular basis to see if I can still support the conclusions I arrived at several years ago when available information was much more sparse. The last time I did this was just a couple of weeks ago. Having DNA evidence to support that I am climbing the correct branches has been very helpful.
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I wouldn't call it rewriting my tree, I've just tweaked my tree multiple times.
I had the wrong father for my Grt Grt Grandfather for years. On both his marriage and death certificates his parents were named as John Campbell and Jessie Campbell nee Macpherson. However I could not find his birth record. According to his age on censuses, marriage and death he was born a year or 2 after civil registration had started in Scotland so in my list of possibilities I had that the family hadn't registered him. They did live in a remote croft. I did find John and Jessie's marriage in the parish registers and John's baptism too so added his parents too. I then put this section of the tree aside and worked on other sections. After about 10 Years I found John's death which seemed a tight time frame for being my grt grt grandfather. This sent me off on another hunt which led to the discovery that my grt grt grandfather's birth had been registered under his mum's maiden name 19 months after John had died. With more work I have established his true (alleged) biological father and now have supporting DNA evidence that he was indeed the father.
I have kept John on my family tree and just fixed the relationships. I have kept him because he as the husband of my 3x grt grandmother so part of her life and he was the father of some of my 3x grt aunts and uncles.
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As my tree fortunately has mostly unusual surnames (Young may be the commonest) I have so far avoided barking up many wrong ones - my obstacles are usually just blind alleys or untraced details. Once or twice I have been rescued by the early Victorian habit of echoing earlier surnames as middle names. That confirmed my suspicion that when Henry Pearson married Sarah Walton in 1806, it had in fact been Henry Piercy, as Walton reappeared in the next generation.
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I have 'Young' in my family tree and when I first started out it was a bit of work to track some of them down.
Looking at some of the trees on-line at the time I saw a date of death for a Great x 2 Grandmother called Elizabeth Young. I had a gut feeling this was wrong so I began quietly my own search. Eventually, I found her she had died some decades after my Great x 2 Grandfather, her husband, but she was in his grave with three of their children. So that and the newspaper notices I found definitely confirmed she was the right one.
Then there was the search for my Great x 3 ancestors - John Young and Ann Young. These were also shown as incorrect on-line. Through a lot of research I was able to find the correct ones eventually - I have no doubt whatever that I have the correct ones through the accumulation of records found. I found Ann eventually by trying to imagine what I would do in her life situation. At the point I started looking for her I had last spotted her living with her eldest married son, after she had become a widow. I imagined myself getting old and frail and decided that in her shoes I would now prefer to go into the care of a daughter rather than a daughter in law. I then looked at the daughters. One appeared to be a stay at home one and the other one seemed like she was quite busy with public affairs. I then decided to focus on the stay at home one as the best candidate to focus on. Lo and behold it turned out that this Great Grandmother did appear to have moved to the area of this daughter and had died in this daughter's home. The death notice made everything so clear that I had at last found the correct Ann Young.
Mind I had to have help with another Ann from another descendant of this person - an ancestral 'cousin' of mine. She was born Ann Isabella but married in a totally unexpected area away from all the family and married as 'Annie'. ::) Without this help I doubt I would ever have solved that one - it was like searching for a needle in a haystack!!
I would always advise if possible, don't take at face value other people's research, especially with common names.
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I had to move somebody on an Ancestry tree to a different set of parents, and got in a real mess as I entered him with the other parents, then deleted him and thought I had lost his descendants and all the details like censuses...so I spent hours finding all this information on his descendants again, only to find I had a load of duplicates. I then tried merging duplicates and getting into a worse mess. Finally I deleted each duplicate individually. I think I am straight now, it was maybe forty people. I lost censuses along the way, but most information is still there. I later found that I could have moved him cleanly with an Ancestry facility to move him and all his descendants to different parents by linking him as somebody already in my tree. I did this on a second branch that I have just for this family, and it worked perfectly.
I had initially thought he was the child of one couple, then found his parents' marriage proving that he is their child, and his mother is the sister of who I thought was his father and sister in law has same first name.
It was very interesting though, a major discovery, as I thought I had lost track of his mother and then found that I have a living distant cousin descended from her.
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Althea7, Next time you think you have lost a bunch of folks just search for one of the names. You can only delete one person at a time, not a whole branch. You just need to reconnect the branch again with the correct relationship.
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Well I have had to get the shears out and prune the tree a few times, but often I find the right man was a namesake first cousin or second cousin of the wrong man/woman of the same name and surname. Ie 2 Thomas Spottiswood's in the same town, and then tracing the wrong one only to find he was his first cousin. Or 2 Lutrecia Edgington's of the same village.
I think when we have the likeliest, we are understandably hesitant to add them in case we find out something that contradicts it. Some may strongly advise against a "leap of faith" but some may say "well add them but keep a note and an open mind". In many of these "likeliest candidates" cases, you may never be completely certain. Records back then were not as well kept and as informative as they are now.
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I agree with the above replies. Not so much a re-write as a prune or a snip. Most of the time the error is picked up in the research stage luckily so the only problem is time lost following the wrong family. That is my current dilemma, with too many possibilities to choose from; Smith in London. ::)
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The good thing about using a computer database to produce a tree is no rewrites are required unlike in the past when trees were drawn by hand.
In those days rewriting a tree was common, there was a limit on the number of additions you could make before the tree became unmanageable and a rewrite was required to allow a better use of the space available.
You can probably imagine the frustration when after adding a couple of hundred names to the tree you found you had transposed the numbers of a date from 1865 to 1685 or similar Tipp-Ex could carefully be used but you always annoyingly knew it was there.
Cheers
Guy
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Not rewritten exactly but have had to chop a branch or two along the way. My ancestors had the habit of using grandparents names for the eldest son, but it wasn't limited to just the eldest son in a family, brothers did it as well for their children, so you would have 4 or 5 eldest sons in one family all having the grandfather's names.!!! So barking up the wrong tree is very easy to do. Tried matching wives, but common names and same surnames didn't make it easier!!!!
Death Notices in estate files here can offer up wonderul information especialy from a well filled in one, but a wrong turn is still easy to make!!!
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Bourne before you rewrite your tree couldnt you be correct
& the record saying bachelor includes widowers
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The odd snip, too. The biggest one was when I accepted a branch from someone who was obviously more experienced then than me, which I accepted. Years later she had the grace to write to me confessing that she'd got the link to my tree wrong. As a result I revised that and all the records that I'd accepted from someone else, and now I've nothing other than what's been verified to me.
Needless to say, I've seen this wrong connection still on some Ancestry trees....
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Brigidmac, are you saying that a widower could indeed call themselves a bachelor, I've always assumed bachelor meant "never married" although I would still need to find a marriage record for John Lock, but it would help assume they are one and the same.
Guy - Tipp-Ex can you still buy that stuff :) does make you glad of computers sometimes, amending hand written trees must have been a horrendous task to undertake, not to mention time consuming.
BourneGooner
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Bourne ..yes a bachelor as in free to marry ...
Same for a spinster .
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I have never seen any records where a widower described himself as a bachelor. However, I have seen a married man describe himself as a bachelor so as to get away with bigamy.
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Twice a complete re write, one was after I lost my paper record of the tree pre internet days the second time when my computer ( along with my back up external hard drive) was stolen.....both times it enabled me to research each and every person again, although I sort of knew who I was looking for and where they were likely to be....... and I have another 'tree' with lots of gaps as when I began no one in my family would tell me anything, my mother particuarly 'anti' so I knew there was lots being 'hidden' no one wanted me to find out about, so that tree satisfied her when she snook a look as I knew she would given the opportunity that her 'secrets' are still hidden ( they aren't) but no point in upsetting anyone.
As no one gets married off before I have found the marriage record, and no one dies/buried until I have found the record I don't have to do much pruning either. However there are many who are alive still hanging around after 150-200 yrs when 'I know' they have died but don't know where/when.
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I`ve just been doing a bit of lopping this week !! Also, putting back some stuff I`d just deleted !!
I`ve a William Short who`s been in out of the tree twice this week, goodness knows why because it`s my own work, verified several times, but sometimes I doubt myself !! Then I found I`d got an extra William,still not sure so back yet again to see who he belongs to. The problem is 2 sets of parents John and Mary married within a year of each other in the same church.
The same thing in another village, this time 2 John and Annes.
Fortunately a complete rewrite hasn`t proved necessary, thank goodness.
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I kill off my relatives with an approximate death date but always add "about " + date
On ancestry you dont get death hints unless you do this but your way is better for others searching because it stops people copying erroneos facts.
So.i will now revive them after searching and keep them private .
Btw on my thru lines some of my great great grands are coming up as private or potential even tho i know they are on my tree does anyone know why.
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As far as I've seen, the terms bachelor and spinster were used to describe people free to marry in the 18th century and earlier; perhaps the meaning changed over time, and even had different meanings in different places.
The term "Mrs" was often used to describe single women of a higher status as well.
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It can be a kick in the teeth when you find out that the wrong line is much more interesting than the right line.
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I totally agree ! I thought I`d found a line to France the time of bonnie Prince Charlie, but I`ve got so many Alexanders I had got the generation wrong ! Once I`d rectified that, it was back to yet more Ag labs; not that there`s anything wrong with " them " but it`s nice to have a variation.
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I really wanted my great grandmother Lottie
to be the theatre assistant and newsmaker who
Collaborated with her escapologist boyfriend in.a dodgy
Adoption scheme
successfully finding a good home for thEIR own baby
Mind you
DNA subjects descended from these babieswill be tearing hair out why their dna results don't match a grandparentborn 1900-06 but match surnames. In a totally different part of England or in Ireland
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I totally agree ! I thought I`d found a line to France the time of bonnie Prince Charlie, but I`ve got so many Alexanders I had got the generation wrong ! Once I`d rectified that, it was back to yet more Ag labs; not that there`s anything wrong with " them " but it`s nice to have a variation.
John Hurt knows all about how wrong lines (or embellished stories) can be more interesting than facts. John always felt close to Ireland, and thought he was descended from Irish royalty and his ancestor was a owner of a business in London when he was a mere clerk. And there was no connection to the Marquis of Sligo, or any Irish blood in John's ancestry that is known.
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Do we try and " make" them be what we want them to be ?
I`m proud of them all ! ( Second thoughts - no, not the 2 who abandoned their wives and families )
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Yes we cannot choose our ancestors. Be best to concentrate on what we do find. Not everyone wants to be related to Danny Dyer thanks very much. ;D
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When I met Christopher Pyne an Australian MP and said we are likely to be related, he replied in his usual plummy tones, "We couldn't possibly be related ". Funnily enough, his ancestors were from London, and prior to that Devon, as are mine; about 3 or 4 generations back they were Pine rather than Pyne too.
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Legend on my mother's side has us related to a minor Earl who's black sheep son was banished to the "colonies". Have to date not found a connection to said Earl, but have found quite a few interesting ancestors, the best being paternal grandma's secrets!!!! ;D ;D
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Not had to do the whole tree but parts of it due to the odd family secret..haha
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I was hoping for good old boring land and sea workers... only to have my mother blurt out one day 'we're related to African royalty.!' Huh.?! :o
Erm... okay... sure we are. Still, being a good daughter I investigated her claims... and she's kinda, sorta right, ::) but not quite. Her cousin, aged 17, was married to an African Prince, Henry Kimera of Bugunda, South Africa for about six months in 1959, up until his older brother found out and demanded he return to Africa forthwith, alone and read him the riot act. The divorce was finalised in 1962. His young ex-wife disappeared to the USA and hasn't been seen since. :(
The other mystery is that my mother's grandfather may not even have existed. ???
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Modifying my tree seems to be constant. New and additional information is one reason and the other is making corrections for dates or typos.
The biggest goof I made was adding in a wife and childrens names of my 3 times great grandfather's uncle.
I found his obituary from 1849 in a couple of newspaper archives and he was described as " A Lifelong Batchelor. "
Andy_T
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I had my 3x great-aunt Eliza down as married to Mr Somebody and having a very nice life.
Wrong! Mr S married a Harriet Eliza who was nothing to do with my family. Somewhere between the parish register and the GRO index, the name Harriet was lost.
Poor Eliza had TB and died aged 30 in the local asylum :'(
Carol
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The other mystery is that my mother's grandfather may not even have existed. ???
Ok, I think we both know that he did. Otherwise we're both imagining this conversation.
Carol
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I added a "very likely but not confirmed" to my tree for a Susannah Watty baptism in Colchester in 1779 to that of my Susannah Watty who wed in 1798 in Southchurch, Essex who died in 1836 aged 56 (born c1780). But now that a lot of Essex records have come online on Anc, (which link to SEAX) I found a Susannah Watty marriage in 1799 in Colchester to John Lullman/Luttman. I have a sub to SEAX already and looking at SEAX she was a spinster when she wed John in 1799. Shows how new finds can blow what is the likeliest to bits.
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As far as I've seen, the terms bachelor and spinster were used to describe people free to marry in the 18th century and earlier; perhaps the meaning changed over time, and even had different meanings in different places.
The term "Mrs" was often used to describe single women of a higher status as well.
Bachelor and Spinster mean/meant a man or woman who had never married, not someone "free to marry". Others are also free to marry - widows, widowers, divorcees. The recent replacement of the legal marital conditions 'Bachelor' and 'Spinster' with 'Single' to my mind muddy the waters, because Single is commonly used by people to indicate they are 'not in a relationship', which is a different concept altogether.
Melbell
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As far as I've seen, the terms bachelor and spinster were used to describe people free to marry in the 18th century and earlier; perhaps the meaning changed over time, and even had different meanings in different places.
The term "Mrs" was often used to describe single women of a higher status as well.
Bachelor and Spinster mean/meant a man or woman who had never married, not someone "free to marry". Others are also free to marry - widows, widowers, divorcees. The recent replacement of the legal marital conditions 'Bachelor' and 'Spinster' with 'Single' to my mind muddy the waters, because Single is commonly used by people to indicate they are 'not in a relationship', which is a different concept altogether.
Melbell
While I understand the more recent meanings of the terms spinster and bachelor, they did hold a different meaning in earlier records. I have seen instances of a woman referred to as a spinster, yet I have proof of an earlier marriage.
Just as the term Mrs did not always infer a married or widowed woman.
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That's interesting - and I'm not disputing what you say, but how do you know she wasn't just telling a lie? Is it just one instance, or have you several examples of this?
I'd be interested to know of other researchers' experiences too??
(I agree about the term Mrs, but that's just a courtesy or form of address, not a legal concept).
Melbell
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I have seen both spinster and bachelor used in cases where the people concerned had been previously married. The first time it sent me off on a wrong tangent, researching the wrong family.
It seems to have been done in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. How widespread the practice was I can't say; I've seen it in Gloucestershire, London, and Devonshire records.
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Thanks for your reply. It's interesting that it seems to occur reasonably frequently.
Melbell
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I started researching my tree about 15 years ago. I am just getting back in to a new stint of it and stupidly realised I have not always noted my sources... so I have no idea how I came to the conclusions that I did.
In some cases, connections I have made are so glaringly incorrect it's embarrassing! I have poor old Ann King apparently having children into her 60's - it's a big mistake, can't figure out what my thought process is so it's back to the drawing board.
It is great to see so many new resources though - I know I am a few years behind here but only just got told about the GRO search research, incredible!
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Welcome back to Rootschat and family history in general ~Rachel~.
It's so easyvto make simple errors when you've got a head of steam up adding information to your tree. Just the other day I noticed several different surnames in my tree starting with O' that had small letters following. Who knows how long they'd been like that.
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I often have to rewrite the tree when I find the supposed ancestor is still a relative. His first cousin or her first cousin, or his father remarrying at an older age.
I have a feeling that the John Britton, widower, who wed Sarah Dalby in 1811 in Rayne, Essex was in fact his father John Snr, and the right marriage was John Britton to Sarah Adcock in Finchingfield in 1803. John was born in Felstead in 1783 to John and Ruth Britton. Ruth died in 1810 in Felstead.
John and Sarah Britton (Nee Adcock) had a duaghter Ruth in 1803 in Finchingfield, then Lindemira Brittain. I descend from Louisa born 1817 in Kent (the family moved there for a short time). John and Sarah had a final child Jemima in 1819.