Brick walls. Ancestors who appear to have been aliens dropped from outer space.
Anyone researching their family tree runs into people like these :-(
My recent research trip has me thinking that it's worth distinguishing between brick walls (a term in fairly common use in genealogical circles) and dead ends.
Follow me over the sliced orange haggis for more....
I've just gotten back from an amazing trip ~ two months in Scotland and Ireland, much of which I spent in various archives and libraries trying to track down my elusive ancestors. Had an amazing time!
But one of the necessities of such a trip ~ even as long as this one was ~ is prioritizing who I am going to search for and what records to concentrate on.
In doing that preparation for the trip, and then as a result of the research I did there, I've decided that it helps to divide the ancestors who have left no trace in the records of their origins into brick walls and dead ends.
Brick walls are those ancestors for whom I think I still have a decent chance at finding some little clue someday, given the records that exist for a particular time and place.
Dead ends are those ancestors where I have (as far as is possible with known records) exhausted the possibilities for finding more details about their origins and/or their lives after they enter the records.
Why the distinction? Brick walls I will keep trying to chip away at; dead ends I can put in the 'I'll revisit someday {who knows what records will be discovered in a barn, or what new technology will allow with DNA?}/, but I will move them from the actively searching pile to focus on the brick walls.
Let me give you some examples....
My great grandmother Elizabeth Little's 1864 birth record in the Scottish Borders just lists illegitimate where her father's name should be. I've searched the extant records (mostly kirk session minutes ~ those from the parish where the birth happened don't exist; searched 15 nearby parishes in the hopes she accused a father from another parish) that might list the father, but haven't found anything. Since she's not my direct paternal line, the only current DNA solution would be an autosomal test, as other descendants of her father would almost certainly show up in possible matches. I've done that with all three major companies (and listed with GEDmatch). There are no straight line male descendants that I have found from her brother (and no way to know if he is a full or half brother, as his birth record has the same illegitimate notation). So I've decided to put Elizabeth's father in the dead end category, despite the huge gap it leaves in my family tree, pending a possible DNA match.
Shankendshiel, Cavers, Roxburghshire ~ where Elizabeth Little was born in 1864:
Elizabeth's maternal great grandfather William Little is right on the edge of being a dead end. He died in 1850, so no detailed civil registration death record (those started in 1855), and the 1841 census also has minimal detail. And his headstone (the only one I've found for an ancestor in Scotland) is too weathered to read more than his name (and was that way when the burying ground survey was done a couple decades ago):
Francis McGee shows up in Edinburgh and gets married in 1848, and I've built up a fairly good record of his life after that, especially given that he was a poor Irish Catholic fish hawker. Paper records from Ireland from before his marriage are unlikely, as he seems to have been Catholic (and DNA tests seem to suggest that he was native Irish Catholic, not Protestant Ulster Scots ~ McGee/Magee is a name that can go either way). But I'd still list him as a brick wall rather than a dead end for a couple reasons:
a) what few pre-1850 Catholic records that exist may be coming on-line later this year
b) as many Irish records as I searched while I was in Ireland, there are lots that are scattered around the country that aren't in the big archives, which may lead to something coming to light
(note: I'm hoping that the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland [PRONI] digitizes what would be an amazing resource. While all the actual pre-1900 Irish census returns have been destroyed, there are pension applications from the early 20th century for people trying to prove their age and pension eligibility with extracts from the 1841 and 1851 census returns. These are by no means complete, but for a country with such a scarcity of records.....I searched the county Francis said he was born in, as finding a sibling would be as good as finding him, but no luck.)
c) Francis is my straight paternal line ~ my father did a Y-DNA test at my request before he died. No really close matches yet, but it only takes one.... the way the results work, there are somewhat fewer variables than with autosomal DNA.
Francis's children Margaret, Helen, Edward, and Peter in the Edinburgh poor house register for 1862:
I have two similar cases in New England (Anthony Sizer in CT in the 1720s, John T. Sears in MA in the 1810s) where men appeared in an area, married a local girl, and left no trace of their origins except for stories that don't quite add up. Once I finish my graduate program, tracking down straight male line descendants and convincing them to test will be high on my genealogical to do wish list ;-)
Comment on John T. Sears's origins:
My couple greats grandfather Robert Jamieson appears in Leith, marries the daughter of a secceeding (not the established Church of Scotland) Presbyterian church, has one son that I've found, and then dies before his widow remarries in 1844 ~ and likely before the 1841 census, as I haven't found him in that. He's an adoptive line, so DNA is no help. One of my planned tasks is to re-analyze his son James's children's naming patterns, as that has already helped with another part of the puzzle. If that doesn't provide any clues, I will move him from the brick wall stack to the dead end file, as this family was one I spent a decent chunk of time trying to find on my trip.
Do you have a dead end or two that you have moved to your essentially inactive file? Or a brick wall who is driving you nuts?
Not a croft that my family lived in (at least that I have found so far...) but very similar to several the Little family and others lived in: