ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s taken me a lifetime to fully appreciate the absolute necessity for nuance.

I could be talking about life itself, but “Roots & Branches” is devoted to genealogy, of course, so I’ll be limiting this discussion just to family history!

I’ll admit that my default impulses often trend toward wanting to make something “cut and dried,” and so therefore retargeting myself to appreciate the nuance of a situation is a continual struggle.

But a worthwhile one!

For example, there was a time I likely would have said that people speaking German in America must have (logically!) come from Germany.

And, indeed, many did.

But German-speaking people could have also come from Switzerland.

Or Austria.

Or Alsace-Lorraine in France.

Or in one of many areas of eastern Europe in which enclaves of ethnic Germans developed in medieval and early modern times, many of which stayed in place until the end of World War II.

So, the nuance of determining the nationality of a German-speaking person has a lot to do with where a family historian might target his or her efforts.

As another example, what if we made the assumption that marriage licenses only showed information pertaining to the bride and groom and that therefore might not be all that valuable if we already have a fair amount of information on the wedding partners.

Here the nuance, in the case of Pennsylvania in particular, is that when marriage licenses began to be required in all the state’s counties in 1885, some leaped into collecting more additional information than others.

In some counties, the information is limited to the names of bridge and groom, date they took out the license, date it was returned, and nothing else.

But many others also include parents’ names, including mothers’ maiden names.

And birthplaces (a few even give birth dates).

And occupations.

And information on previous spouses if applicable.

While you can’t come to expect such additional details, if you ignore the records at your genealogical peril.

Related to this, also realize that if the marriage was performed as part of a religious ceremony, additional pastoral or congregational records likely were kept and may be quite detailed.

These religious records might lead to more details about the family, including information about the family predating civil registry such as births of children.

I’m reminded of a particular case from the mid-1800s in which there were baptisms of 10 children recorded but the amount of information given in each was varied.

Only one of the baptisms listed the birthplace of the father in Germany, making it the key to proving the family’s ancestry in Europe.

Keep your mind open to all the possibilities … even some that may seem improbable at first!