A Little Help with Questions

If you are looking at your family tree and have no idea where to begin asking questions, try these!

Sometimes as we look through an online family tree or the thick binder passed around at our reunions, we see something like this:

Clearly Joseph Frink and Judith Palmer could not have married five years after Judith died.

So a genealogist right away asks questions: Did Judith really die in 1726? What evidence exists that this was the case? If she did die in that year, then to whom was Joseph married in 1731? Etc

But sometimes the questions to be asked are not SO glaringly obvious.

If you could use a kickstart to asking productive questions about your family tree, try looking for other “red flags” like these:

#1 No sources listed.

What do you know? How do you know it?

Every piece of information in your tree should be supported by a source that provides evidence of its truth or validity.

#2 Errors in logic.

Is this possible? Is it probable?

Did your female ancestor marry at age 12? Give birth to a child at age 50?

Did he/she live in the same place throughout their lifetime?

If birth, marriage, death are noted in widely-spread localities, does this migration make sense for the time & place in which they lived?

Did the localities listed actually exist when your ancestor lived there?

#3 Information is not necessarily illogical, but causes you to ask questions nonetheless.

This may very well indicate that important information has been overlooked!

If a spouse died relatively young, is it likely the surviving spouse remarried?

If large gaps between children’s births are apparent, could other children have been born in this family and died young? Or been born and lived to adulthood – but for some reason or another, have not been identified as belonging to this family?

Could your ancestor have possibly served in a time of war, or been registered with a draft for a war?

Is this person’s information rich in details, or are the words “about” or “approximately” used?

Does your relative’s name appear differently in different records? This either indicates:

• Records attributed to this one individual actually pertain to two or more distinct individuals
• OR This individual went by different names at different times in their life. This begs the question: WHY?

This list is only a beginning, of course.

Please comment on this post and share the questions that YOU find yourself asking frequently as you examine a new branch in your family tree!

And be ready soon to start planning your search for the answers to your questions! 😀