Strategies to unlock your family stories: Migration Maps, research, Ancestry DNA, relatives, detective work
Your research goal is to identify Characters who face Conflicts or obstacles to overcome, in a specific Setting, and how the characters overcome the obstacles they face, or the Resolution.
A Migration Map which helps tell the story of your ancestors based simply on where they were born, or where they died, and connecting that to events in that place and time they lived. Here’s how.
Create your family’s Five Generation Migration Chart, starting with you. Go as far back as you are able filling in your ancestors’ names and birth or death years.
Start with your full name (middle names often supply clues), place of birth, and your full date of birth (again, clues leading to larger narratives). Then do the same for your mother’s family and your father’s family (the next set of boxes, and then their parents’ information going back as far as can.
Why? Yes, family historians have ways of teasing out facts to help tell the story, but granular stories are difficult to tell unless your ancestors were well-known in the community and were reported on in newspapers or books of the times. This provides some information to start you on your journey.
Explanation: A Migration Map which helps tell the story of your ancestors based simply on where they were born, or where they died. This information, of course, comes from the census, voting registrations, family Bibles, church records (birth, death), baby books, stories, and other records. The more, the better. It will help guide your journey to uncover the rest of your family tree, and the overall historic narrative they participated in, not always by choice.
Once you have built out your immediate family tree, (I like using familysearch.org) you can begin researching your ancestors and their siblings—and discover the older relatives who may have been the family history guru.
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The next step is building out the tree from the known information.
The best way to get started is with familysearch.org. Other people may have already added your ancestors, and all you need to do is add the information you already know from your Migration Map to the tree. It’s free, and living people are not shown.
Important differences between services.
While familysearch.org has one family tree with multiple people working on them, Ancestry.com has individual trees for each person to document what they know about the family tree, and as long as you keep paying they will aggregate that data and throw it up on your screen to uncover the mysterious corners of your family. Other family trees may, or may not, be public.
Familysearch.org does not use DNA. Ancestry does. When you are adopted as a child, the family that reared you is your chosen family. Familysearch.org does allow you to have additional parents who can be set as your primary family.
Ancestry.com has always offered the largest database of global DNA, so your chances of finding your DNA family are far greater.
There are sometimes unresolved questions, including adoption, that can only be resolved using DNA. We used Ancestry.com DNA tests to discover the DNA roots of our family, and familysearch.org to discover a well-documented family line we never knew of.
If you already have a free Ancestry account, I’d recommend you put together a pile of research questions and pay for a short subscription, and continue using familysearch.com for their extensive catalog of primary source materials that may already be attached to your ancestors. The more you know about your ancestors, the more accurate the tree will be.
Anyone can access genealogical records and receive personal assistance with their family history from at smaller nearby Family Search Centers that are usually found inside Latter-day Saint meetinghouses. They are free and open to the public. Each facility offers both novices and experienced family historians the tools and resources to learn about their ancestors.
Of course the DNA proves that every single living human on planet earth is related to the same mitochondrial Adam and mitochondrial Eve. In a broad way, through testing indigenous populations across the world, we can even track the migration patterns of those ancestors.
Most family records that can be found for those living on the North American continent generally go back as far as the 1600s. It is easy for stories about families to get lost over time, so if you have heard family stories document them, either in a journal or as a digital note in online ancestry profiles.
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What you discover and the people you meet along the way will amaze you.
The last person in my family to have worked on the family tree was my great-grandfather John Edgar McElrath. Three of us in one of our lines are the first to update the family stories and images (photography wasn’t in wide use until the late 1800’s). A well-known Tennessee portrait artist painted John Edgar as well as his father, mother, and sister.
As a result of our renewed work on the family tree, there are now historians and writers and museums with whom we have worked, which has extended our understanding of the lives of our ancestors. We have also uncovered new artifacts and stories. There are people out there ready, willing, and able to help you on your journey, too. Most of them found us through familysearch.org and contacted us. RootsTech has an app that shows you all the people in the world who are related to you, and you may also be able to find new information from active family researchers who, virtually or in person, attend this convention.
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How does the Migration Map help me find clues and get to know my family?
This Migration Map charts the birth locations of people in my family tree.
One of my branches (check out the Connecticut line) goes back to John & Priscilla Alden on the Mayflower—8th grandparents—which means they are only one of 256 grandparents in that generation. (We are all cousins.) That is how we are all interconnected.
By checking the actual birth dates in either your family records or from familysearch.org, you can look at broad historical periods. For example, You might ask why a family suddenly jolted from New York/Tennessee to California. If you guessed The Civil War, you would be correct!
You might ask why families suddenly sailed from Scotland & the British Isles to Canada and America in the 1600s. Type “Scotland in 1600s” into your browser and you will discover why:
“In the 1600s, Scotland underwent significant religious, political, and social changes, including the Protestant Reformation, the Union of the Crowns with England, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, leading to the execution of Charles I and the eventual restoration of the monarchy.” —Google AI, a fairly acurate summary
“The term Scotch-Irish is used primarily in the United States, with people in Great Britain or Ireland who are of a similar ancestry identifying as Ulster Scots people. Many left for North America, but over 100,000 Scottish Presbyterians still lived in Ulster in 1700. Many English-born settlers of this period were also Presbyterians. When King Charles I attempted to force these Presbyterians into the Church of England in the 1630s, many chose to emigrate to North America, where religious liberty was greater. Later attempts to force the Church of England's control over dissident Protestants in Ireland led to further waves of immigration to the transatlantic colonies." —Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans
If your family were Presbyterians in the past, there is a good chance they were part of of the Scots-Irish migration. That’s a clue!
You might wonder why they suddenly bolted for California after landing in Ontario, Canada, and if you guessed the California Gold Rush, you would be correct, but they were not after gold, but the wealth they could create building houses, starting farms, and opening restaurants, among other things.
A cousin updated a book written by his ancestor that describes George D. Dornin’s journey to California during the Gold Rush, and offers vivid descriptions of the trip around the horn and early California life. If you have ancestors who journeyed west, the descriptions he offers will help you see the life your ancestors may have lived, too.
What do you do when you hit a brick wall?
Now on to the the part that requires patience and perseverance!
The only family member I could identify on the Melton line was my great-grandmother (above). She married an early Mormon whose first wife died leaving him with six children. At 16 she married the 46-year-old man and had six more children. After he divorced her she left him with the children for his third wife to take care of. He also divorced her.
She had a relationship with a Kansas farmer whose first wife had died and second wife left him, leaving him one son and eight girls. They had a child together, my grandfather, and she dropped him off at her father’s house to raise so she could marry a blacksmith/railroad worker and had five more children who she cared for the rest of her life. She did once visit her first family on the trip to San Diego.
There were no birth records for the middle father. The information about her son’s father, my grandfather, was passed down, but the truth was cleverly concealed from him, and the information the family believed was incorrect.
He never knew his birth father. I eventually discovered his birth name on the 1900 census, which by the 1910 census had been changed to Melton. I had done enough research to suspect his DNA father was a farmer in Kansas, but I waited decades until DNA was available to prove it.
My DNA great-grandfather (below) was a farmer in Kansas, according to DNA relatives on Ancestry. From the census, I noticed that he had a son, and nine daughters. And his wife had died. And he had remarried. But he was obviously desperate to have sons to help him with the farm. Why did they leave?
If you guessed The Dust Bowl, a man-made ecological disaster and a severe drought and dust storm that hit the Great Plains in the 1930s, you would be correct!
From that I was able to piece together the rest of the story:
Biography of Stillman Eli “Guy” Wilkins and his son Calvin Guy Wilkins (Melton)
Through an Ancestry DNA test and Thrulines genealogy breakthrough, and other information that pointed in this direction, we have finally uncovered the true identity of this ancestor, my great-grandfather Guy Wilkins. Family lore turned out to be true – he was a farmer in Kansas.
I learned this from contacting an AncestryDNA cousin who is the great-granddaughter through his daughter Erma Lorene Wilkins (Ford). She also did not know much about him in her response to my query, but offered this:
“Guy Wilkins died when my grandmother was only 18 months old...Dec. 26 1917. My Great Grandmother, Myrtle Letha Wilson, moved back to Oklahoma. Myrtle was raised by her grandparents, She went by their surname, Wilson. I only knew Stillman by the name "Guy" until after my grandmother's death and I started searching for information about him because I never heard anything other than they were in Kansas. My mother told me that Grandma Ford corresponded with some of her half sisters. But the letters that she saved were somehow lost after my Grandpa Ford married again and moved from the home he had built with my grandma.
I have searched and, hopefully, have traced Guy's family back to Wales. I really don't know much more about him. Bray Wilkins, 1610-1702, was quite a notable character. I am pretty sure he was our first Wilkins in the United States. Landing in Massachusetts in 1630's.”She also said that no one called him Stillman; he was known only as Guy Wilkins. His son Calvin (my grandfather) was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma Territory in 1898 (Oklahoma did not become a state until Nov 16, 1907) and was turned over to be reared by his grandfather and his grandfather's third wife Elyzabeth after his mother Minnie married Edward Welborn in 1899 and then had six children, all while in Oklahoma.
The United States Census in 1900 lists Calvin's birth name as "Calvin G Wilkins." In the Shawnee High School yearbook of 1914, he is listed as a member of the freshman class as "Calvin Guy Melton."
A year after his grandfather Calvin Nance Melton died, he legally changed his name to Calvin Nance Melton, the same as his grandfather, to honor him. He changed his name on April 16, 1917 at the age of 17 – the same year his birth father had died, unbeknownst to him. He submitted his petition for change of name in the state court of Colorado, County of Bent. Petition was granted on April 16, 1917.
No one called him Stillman, and everyone knew him only as "Guy."
Stillman was a farmer who first married at age 27 to Alice Walker in 1883, and they had nine children. His first child was a son and all the rest were daughters. She died two years after their last child was born in 1898.
Although he fathered Calvin Guy Wilkins with Minnie Elizabeth Melton and Calvin Guy Wilkins was born in 1898, by 1900 Minnie had married Earnest W. Welborn, and Stillman did not marry again until 1914, according to family search.
Stillman married Myrtle Letha Winters in Washington, Oklahoma, and they had one child, Erma Lorene Wilkins.
The web is a great place to begin your journey, and to show, through birth and death records, where they migrated, or where they stayed. By using the web to search for the places and dates, you can discover what they were fleeing, or where they were headed and why.
There are also local and regional genealogical records. For example, if you discover your ancestors arrived to any of the New England states, American Ancestors is a great resource. It is also online and contains comprehensive genealogical and biographical accounts of the twenty thousand English men, women, and children who settled in New England between 1620 and 1640.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, you still hit a brick wall.
Then it’s time to consider challenging yourself to discover your gifts, and what humbles you. Pursue the things you are naturally good at, and develop skills for what challenges you. That’s what you’ve inherited from your birth parents. Know yourself, and you will know your parents. I’ve explained that to many students over the years.
Try out everything, especially in school. I attended a small high school of 400 students in Sonoma County, California. All of us in a small community have to participate in order for there to be, for example, a football team, a band, a play, a newspaper, a yearbook, a debate team, and other activities and events.
Try everything. That is the way to really discover who you are. Then share that with your family and friends.