ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ll freely admit there are some “do as I say not as I do” aspects to what I preach about genealogy.

I’m very much a backer of what some call “whole-family genealogy,” meaning that you don’t just identify your own direct-line ancestry but also delve into collateral relatives.

There are a number of reasons for this. Researching siblings of your ancestors, for instance, can help correct errors in your genealogy that develop when the records of your direct line are either incomplete or inaccurate.

An example of this would be when your ancestor’s death certificate gives “unknown” for the mother’s name but you find certificates for siblings older and younger than your ancestor, allowing you to infer the mother’s name.

Tracing relatives beyond ancestral siblings—to your cousins and their descendants all the way to the present day—can be quite time consuming, but once again the rewards can substantial.

For example, family Bibles and other one-of-a-king artifacts aren’t often equally distributed throughout descendants of a couple. But researching all those cousins, nieces, nephews and other more tangential relations may be the only way you’ll come upon such gems.

Another concept of which I’m fully in favor is doing the social history of your ancestry. This isn’t often easy (especially if you have “common people” as your ancestors like me!) but is possible by reading the core history sources relating to your ethnic or religious groups.

And probably just as important as those core sources are all the footnotes and endnotes leading you, in many cases, to even more specific books, documents and records that will put your ancestor’s occupation, class or daily life in context.

This leads you books by, for example, economic historians whose works wouldn’t jump out at you but can be helpful.

Finally, I’m still going to tell beginning genealogists to look at all “at home” sources before starting to troll the Internet for more information about your family.

Of course, this dictum was a lot easier to obey back in those days of yore when I began researching my genealogy (the mid-1980s, by the way).

To avoid the plague of bad information you’ll find quickly at online family trees, take some time to see if you have a collection of documents with first-hand information—vital records certificates or family registers or military papers—awaiting you in a family attic.

It’s still the truth in the Internet age that you’ll waste a lot less time if work backwards from the known to the unknown (I violated this my first time in the State Library of Pennsylvania when I found a surname history on a Beidler family and assumed it “had” to be mine … it wasn’t!)

So, who has the time for all this?

Who doesn’t—or, at least, doesn’t want to?