How Deep Can Your Ancestry Be Traced?
Tracing your ancestry is like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle. To start the adventure, you must sift through a pile of shapes and locate those straight-edged pieces that form the border. Your research should begin with pieces that fit easily, what is called “genealogical clues” within the family. These consist of bits of information gleaned from interviewing relatives and friends and from sifting through photographs, letters, and memorabilia gathered over many years of family life. Searching for such information will bring its surprises, and you will probably meet distant relatives of whom you had no previous knowledge.
Overall success in tracing ancestral history is often directly proportional to skills developed during the initial research within the family. Combing sources at home and interviewing relatives will not only teach you much about evidence, but it will also stimulate your desire to continue searching in public archives and libraries.
How much can you expect to learn about your family from interviewing relatives or friends? No answer is applicable to all cases, but most families have collective memories that extend three to five generations. Thus, you can obtain basic information on your own generation and those of your parents and grandparents from interviewing relatives and searching family records.
The acid test, and perhaps the key to your entire genealogical success, will lie in how much the family can tell you about your eight great-grandparents and sixteen great-great grandparents, who probably lived in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. The century from the American Revolution or slightly earlier to 1875 or so is unquestionably the most difficult in American genealogy.
Families often disappeared entirely from written records during this period of expansion and large-scale migration. A New England family from Connecticut might have lived in four or five places, ranging from southern Vermont, to western New York, to Ohio or Illinois, then to Missouri or Kansas, and finally to Oregon or California. Similarly, a Virginia family might have followed paths through the Shenandoah Valley to Kentucky, then moved into the border states of Tennessee and Missouri, and settled finally in Arkansas, Louisiana, or Texas.
In these "pioneer states," official records such as land, probate, and court records were usually poorly kept if they were kept at all. If you can identify most of your ancestors who lived between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the remainder of your research should be easier. Your hunt for these elusive nineteenth-century forebears should begin with living relatives, for you may find that their memory extends considerably beyond three generations. Listen to their stories and gossip, note their comments and biases, and do not be afraid to contact relatives who don't know you but may remember your parents or grandparents.
