Genealogy frustrations.

[Braindead]

My biggest frustation at the moment is a statement I made some years ago in my research: "xxxx was sent away to school with his brother in 1870. A year later his youngest brother joined them."
I would never have made such a statement without the facts to back it up but I obviously didn't reference it! Now I'm researching the younger brother and it's driving me mad that I can't find the source.

[coombs]

Or you find a snippet of info on an ancestor, and then find you already had it in your notes/Ancestry tree notes etc.

[Stanwix England]

My frustration today is myself. I started doing our family tree when I had a very young baby. This was a mistake as I was really tired and clearly not able to concentrate on details properly.

I've just found out I've made a mistake. Luckily it's not too bad and was on a branch I hadn't worked on that much, but I've just had to go through and delete a load of stuff. Oh well.

To be fair to me, it was partly Ancestry's fault for mistranscribing a record and thus missing out a crucial detail.

[jbml]

I would agree with most of the frustrations mentioned already, I think mine are only realising now the questions I should have asked when I was a child and wishing I had listen more carefully to the answers I did get.

This just reminded me of H2G2:

Arthur: it's at times like this, when I'm about to be thrown out of the airlock of a Vogon spaceship 8 light years from Earth that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother always used to tell me

For: Oh? What did she tell you?

Arthur: I don't know - I wasn't listening

[jbml]

It's true that when you turn up a Brown or a Smith or a Jones your heart sinks at the difficulties to come, but counterintuitively you can have just as much trouble with a more unusual name which can attract multiple spellings.

Oh, tell me about it!

Nebuchadnezzar Ashby.

I have yet to find any two records in which HIS name is spelled the same way!!!

[coombs]

Or transcriptions that omit vital details such as marriage witnesses after 1754. If you will transcribe, at least go the whole hog. Witnesses to marriages is fundamental especially in the 1754-June 1837 period before civil reg.

Another frustration is when dates are misleading and it says "Poor law records 1740-1820" when actually it is 1740-1742 then skips to 1790-1820. I saw that once in Oxford Record office for Bletchingdon poor law records. It was quite misleading before I obtained the originals to view.

[Clarkey500]

My common surnames.
Thats my headache.  My Johnson ancestor married a Brown in the 1800s and I have never ever been certain I have the right Brown even doing DNA. 
 That is but 2 of my common surnames where there are to many choices that "could be" my ancestor and there is no way I can rule out every possible one.  This is in the Durham Northumberland area.


Best wishes from Canada.

My Durham/Cumberland/Northumberland Browns are similar - too many of them! I was able to get back a bit further with one, who consistently said her birthplace was Ruttleback. It turned out, after a lot of searching, this was Rattlebeck - a few cottages in Cumberland - where she wasn't born, but moved there very young...

My other Brown line in those counties has been equally challenging!

[coombs]

Uncertainty is what comes with genealogy much of the time. I find Durham ancestors are a pain due to the much higher occurrence of the same surname. Wilson, Robson, Dobson, Hodgson, Forster.

Also we always have to face the small chance that the man named on a birth/baptism certificate was not the real father of your ancestor. A quick roll in the hay with the neighbour, the dalliances with the milkman or temporary separation leading to a fling, or the wife seeing another man and the hubby being none the wiser. Not sure the rate of infidelity in our ancestors days, but only advances in DNA testing will give a more accurate reading.

[Stanwix England]

Nebuchadnezzar Ashby

Flipping heck, as someone with a primary school aged child it's not that long ago that I went through the rigmarole of phonics and spelling. That name brings me out in stress hives. No wonder you find him hard to find and it's not spelt the same in two places.

Bet they all called him Neb for short.