Seven strategies to break through brick walls, grow your family tree, and tell their stories
Also, three things about Mayflower passengers you probably didn't know.
People tend to group all the passengers on the Mayflower as one group, when in fact there were four groups: The Separatists seeking religious freedom, families and individuals recruited by London merchants, indentured servants, and Mayflower sailors who contracted to stay a year in New Plymouth. I like the way familysearch.org breaks it down and offers a detailed discussion of each group on their Mayflower blog page: https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/mayflower-passenger-list
Then there is a poster I like which shows the risk the passengers were willing to take, especially those who wanted to escape religious persecution. This chart represents the people who were on the Mayflower, and how many of them from all four groups survived a year later:
https://i0.wp.com/behindeveryday.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/mayflower-passengers.jpg
It's also perplexing how this one group got all the attention, since there were already colonies established, except for one detail: They were refugees. It’s a continuous thread that weaves itself into the American experience.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-pilgrims-were-the-original-refugees
I mention Mayflower ancestors because most people have heard of them, they have a story that is well-known to the public, and from that we can build a story—even if some of it has become inaccurate over time.
As far as whether you may have an immigrant ancestor (probably) or a Mayflower ancestor (there are clues in the names that are passed down) here are some techniques I have found useful:
1. The male last names rarely change, so the big breakthroughs come from tracing the women—or finding birth families of adopted children. It’s a geometric series, so names open up after a couple of generations: 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents … 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 at generation 10. Half of them will be women. If you work with computers, these numbers will look familiar.
2. Build entire families rather than just direct ancestors. You are really looking for the family member every couple of generations who is the family historian/genealogist/storyteller. You are in luck if you find the storyteller and they wrote it down or were quoted.
3. Know your geography and history. Create a Migration Map of your ancestors’ births (you can add other events as you discover they moved several times during their lifetime and start wondering why). The maps will reveal aspects of American history that can be discovered if you have a date and a place.
4. Sometimes family names are hiding in plain sight. Many British and European families have a tradition of giving children middle names of ancestors – especially if they are related to a notable family member. (Mistakes have also been made so proceed carefully.)
5. The closer the date of a document is to the living person, generally the more accurate it is. Family Bibles are usually contemporaneous records or copied from those records.
6. Sometimes what you learn gives rise to intriguing questions. Pursuing answers to those questions reveals information that can be helpful. Learning the history of a place or its people can also be helpful.
7. Sometimes a story is passed down and is incomplete or incorrect but may also confirm something. Long before I began researching my great-great grandfather and grandmother, my mom passed along things she had learned writing about and talking with her family. For example, “our family served the first strawberries in the City (SF).” That’s all she knew. I sketched out a few details from www.familysearch.org profile, then began searching in libraries and eventually online for more information, which I found—much more information: The cemetery he founded and is buried in, an epicurean history of the SF Bay Area that had a menu from his restaurant, that his farm-to-table operation was located near what is now Fisherman’s Wharf. I learned that eggs (from Petaluma) and strawberries arrived late to the Bay Area, and concluded that he probably was the first to serve them. Recently I learned he had two or three restaurants. That one clue confirmed my hunch.
My great-grandfather prepared a family history document about each of the family’s lines. He was a lawyer in Oakland with 11 children and a wife who was a Mayflower descendent. She and her children were mentioned in the Oakland Tribune almost every week, from my study of the California Digital Newspaper Collection. (CDNC just had their funding cut for next year, so if you live in California write to your representative and senator. I volunteer as a proofreader, correcting errors.)
Here is the page with everything about his father-in-law that was passed down to us:
That’s it. That’s what I started with. I received this when I was 19, but it wasn’t until after we married with children that I took a more serious interest in telling their stories. Some of them my mom had written in high school English class, and through journalism and teaching I’ve always focused on the through-line narrative of a story.
I used all of the techniques above and more primary news and documents research to figure out some long-lost mysteries—like my mother’s recollection of the family serving the first strawberries in San Francisco. I’m sharing the link to the 10-page Word document I wrote and designed about this Mayflower line, including documentation of the sources I used.
It was a labor of love, a fascinating narrative to weave. Hope you enjoy it!
Solomon Ellsworth Alden Biography (click to read online, or download file below)
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Have these techniques worked well for you? What other techniques do you use? Questions?
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