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Some people don't realize all the work involved--it really is a never-ending task. You are never finished once you start. And managing it all is a huge endeavor and can really be quite time-consuming. Some things you'll never discover or know for sure one way or another. People want definite answers and often that is not possible.
I find it funny that so many people I've tried to help can't understand the ambiguousness of the old census records--like the spellings of names changing, due to the illiteracy of a large part of the population and census takers spelling the names phonetically. I think lots of people may not have known how to spell their own names. This is shocking and unbelieveable to some in today's society.
In my main paternal line the name changed many times since 1800. I once got into it w/ an older gentleman (a distant cousin). Me and a few other family researchers had proven several points, largely through the use of the Internet, and this man argued extensively that our findings were not possible because of slight differences in the spelling of the surname. He had done all of his research way back, traveling in the summers to courthouses and cemetaries. For instance, he had found one ancestor's marriage record in the 1850's but nothing more on that individual. We picked him up twenty years later, halfway across the state, remarried to another wife. Easy enough, but because of the spelling differences, he could not accept it.
On another line, I discovered that some of my ancestors had been the mulatto offspring of slaveholders, and after the Civil War had married into sharecropping families and moved west like everyone was doing then. Boy did that stir the pot! LOL!
People need a grasp of history in order to fully appreciate the big search.
Very true about spellings. I helped someone once who has a surname that ended sometimes in -N and sometimes -NN. Took a while for him to realize that didn't exclude the findings. When all the other names and such add up, the places of birth, children and their ages, etc. How much more proof do you need?
Some people don't have a fully developed view of the world then or now.
Funny story here.......my GGG grandfather was quite a ladies man, even building a house for his mistress in the side yard of his own home. (I always wondered why my GGG grandmother looked so sour, lol)
He had a child with this woman, and that childs descendants still live in the area with my immediate family.
I put this info on a website dealing with genealogy dealing with the particular area that my family is from, and one of my aunts had a cow!
She contended that these relatives "would not appreciate it". She said they didnt know about all this, and would not want their "personal business" out in cyberspace.
I laughed til I cried.......one would think that I was talking about a living person, not someone who had been dead for 100 years!
Its actually one of my favorite family stories.
Or I get "there's probably some history that we don't want dug up" like they are afraid of finding skeletons in their closet... that is the fun of it though.
I LOVE skeletons......
One of my Cousins was elizabeth Andrew borden [of Axe fame]
and an uncle was the most famous horsethief/murderer in all of Canada.....
A fellow contacted me (he was a 2nd cousin) and said that he was thrilled that he had found so much data that matched what he knew of his family and he was certain that we must be related. He was right, his gg grandfather was my gg grandmother's brother, and they came to the U.S. from Canada together in 1865. He and his wife returned after having three kids in the U.S.
This guy was thrilled and couldn't wait to share with his mother. But he came back and reported that it was mistake according to his mother - despite the fact that all the info he had on four people, including his mother, was spot on!
And why was it a mistake?
Because his mother said that her grandmother couldn't have been born in the U.S. This despite the fact that she has census data there, along with two brothers and her parents, and after their return to Canada her first census says U.S. birth place.
But she changed her birthplace to Canada after that, and evidently her daughter never knew that the family had briefly sojourned in the U.S.
And this guy just dropped it "because my mother said."
I mean, isn't there an age to give up that kind of stuff.....like maybe around your eleventh birthday.
My mother, she's 87 now, always lamented "not knowing her mother's people" as a result of her being orphaned at a young age and then being raised by an "aunt". Well, that in part probably spurred all my geneological searches. I found out from public records that she had a couple of deceased siblings AND that her "aunt" was really her adopted sister. Now she hates that I brought her any of this information, she discredits any sources I might have (census data and birth/death records) and rails against my "meddling' in her past. Perhaps it's dementia or maybe just old issues resurfacing. She made me feel really lousy for just trying to enlighten her about an uncertain past. Now I just keep s&% to myself.
If my wife could do nothing but geneology 24/7 it would suit her just fine! After we realized our dating was heading to marriage, she got all excited. She had another family she could do the family tree on! A month later, she had a 600+ page book ready for my dad's birthday tracing our family to the Lord Mayor of London in the 1600s.
I have gone with her to the library that has census, birth and death records from this part of the state. but I can't sit there and look through all that. I"m proud of her for wanting to do it, and she helps people through randomactsofkindness.com and findagrave.com, and I'll support her any way I can.
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