Doxxing Dead People
You may or may not know that I’m obsessed with genealogy. If you didn’t know that, hi, I’m Erica, genealogy is my jam.
I’ve offered many times to help people do their family trees, and recently after such an offer, someone asked me how they could do it themselves. This wasn’t the first time, and I figured it was time to get off my ass and share how I do my family tree research, so I’ve written this quick look at how I build family trees. Some notes: This is just a cursory overview of my process, written in sleepy haze. In reality, there is a lot more puzzling and logic involved in this than my writing below lets on. Also, since I’m the descendant of slaves and the white folks who had sex with them, my research has been limited to the United States. As such, this is geared toward researching ancestors in the US. Here we go.
Tools
I use Ancestry to build my tree and do the bulk of my research. Ancestry’s database of information is massive and continues to grow, both from partnerships with other sites that have data and their work digitizing records. That said, Ancestry is not cheap and they’re not the only show in town. FamilySearch has tree building tools and a massive searchable database as well, and it’s free. They’re also in the game of digitizing records. Their tools aren’t nearly as good as Ancestry’s, but a good amount of the data is there. Note that if you’re using Ancestry, they’ve partnered with FamilySearch, so you don’t need to go to both. Also note that the genealogy space is dominated by Mormon people, and FamilySearch is run by the Mormon church. I don’t give a damn about that, but if you have serious objections to associating with things related to religion, you’re going to have a bad time doing genealogy. Ok, back on track, there are other tree building sites out there like MyHeritage and Geni, but I’m not a fan of either. MyHeritage’s UI isn’t very good and last I checked, Geni doesn’t do GEDCOM (the standard for storing and sharing tree data) support very well.
There are other sites with data out there as well, and I tend to use Google to find them. The small county sites on USGenWeb are usually what I’ll land on by doing a search for “[COUNTY NAME] county genealogy”, though occasionally there are more robust sites out there, depending on how active the genealogists are in a county.
Newspapers are a fantastic resource for finding background information on someone, finding old obituaries, marriage announcements and birth announcements. I use GenealogyBank, another paid site, to do the majority of my newspaper searches. I also search Google Newspapers, which has many papers Genealogybank doesn’t have, and Chronicling America, the a newspaper archive put together by the Library of Congress. Once again, there are more places to get newspaper archives, but those are the ones I use.
Process
If I’m starting a new tree, my first step is to gather as much data as I can from people who are still living. Talking to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, great aunts, everyone. The best way to get folks talking is to ask them questions about their lives. My goal here is to get them talking about people who were alive at the time the 1940 census was taken (we’ll get to the why of that later). Some good questions are:
- What were your favorite memory with your grandparents?
- Where did you live when you were growing up?
- What was it like while you were growing up?
- Did your parents ever tell you what it was like when they were growing up?
Questions like this serve multiple purposes. First, they get the person thinking about their family and recalling memories. Second, answers to questions like this are full of details you might not need now, but could come back to later. Third, these questions lead to more questions, allowing you to get more information. I used to take notes when asking these questions, but these days just prefer to record answers with my phone. That way, I don’t miss something that could be crucially important later.
Once I’ve gotten all the data I can get from relatives, I start filling in the tree with my immediate ancestors. If I’ve gotten the names of one of more relatives who were alive during the 1940 census, I have a good starting point for my Ancestry.com research.
I start searching census records first. If I know the name of two family members who were alive during the 1940 census, it helps me identify a family. Since the 1940 census was the latest census to be released, it’s the most likely to contain the names of relatives that folks alive today know. When I’m searching census records, I usually start looking in a very narrow area (specific city), then broaden the search out first to county, then to adjacent counties, then to state, then to adjacent states. Searching in this way helps to find people who have moved around, without also finding too many false positives. About the false positives: a rookie mistake people doing casual tree research tend to make is incorrectly assuming someone with the same name must be their relative and then they add bad data to their tree. One piece of bad data can cause major problems later, so I am very careful to do cross checking of any sources. For example, I won’t add a census record unless the names of family members match up with other census records I have.
Once I’m done with census records, I start searching for death records. People have historically been buried in cemeteries with family members, so that’s a place I look for information. Ancestry recently got access to social security applications, which tend to be treasure troves of data, especially for female ancestors, as they list their maiden names there. Speaking of maiden names, here’s another rookie mistake: searching for a female relatives married name (say Jane Smith) and finding an unmarried young woman or girl with that name and assuming it’s the right person. Always search maiden names for female relatives, especially if you’re looking for records about them before they were married. Death records often list parents names, which is helpful for pushing back a generation in the tree.
After death records, I look for marriage records. Armed with the maiden name I got from the death records, I go searching for the marriage records. I gather what data I can from the marriage records (marriage records often list parents names), then move on to birth records. There isn’t much to be found in birth records that I can’t get elsewhere, but if I’m having trouble identifying a relatives mother (especially if the mother died in childbirth), the birth records are helpful.
At this point, I’ll also start searching newspaper archives for obituaries. Obits tend to be full of information about a person; their siblings, where they were born (helpful for knowing where to focus a census search), names of siblings’ spouses, etc.
Once I’ve exhausted the newspaper archives, I start searching for the county genealogy sites of the counties my relatives lived in. The goal is to leave no stone unturned and add in all good data about my relatives I can find. If you’re still living in the area where your relatives lived, it would be a smart move to figure out where your county keeps their records and do some manual searching on your own. Though there is a lot of data online, not nearly all of it is, and county records can fill in some blanks you wouldn’t be able to fill in with online databases.
When I’ve gotten all the info I can from all my data sources, and can go no farther back into the tree, I start searching for siblings, using the same methods above. Siblings tend to turn up information that other relatives have not. For example, though your grandmother may not have listed her mothers maiden name on her social security application, her sister or brother may have, so siblings are great for pushing through brick walls. Similarly, I’ve often found other relatives living with siblings in the census records, which helped to identify where and why people have moved around.
Aside from some fanciness with searching (example of fancy searching: know the address of someone? Look for people who lived at the same address by searching for the address as a exact keyword. Sometimes that turns up relatives who haven’t been listed anywhere else), my process for finding relatives and building out a tree is just repetition of the steps above. Things get more complicated once genetic genealogy is added to the mix, but that’s a post for a later day.
Hope this helps someone! Have fun tree building!
