Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 2 - Expanding the Foundation

{Previous Post: Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 1 - Building the Base}

Previously, I added my parents into my new Ancestry tree and completed the process of verifying the hints that showed up for each of them. While processing these hints, some of my grandparents started to appear. In this post, I will expand on the hints associated to these new additions and my knowledge of my grandparents to finish out most of the limits of my experiential understanding of my ancestors. Once we completed this exercise, we will have to start relying on the memory of other family members and whatever other hints appear on my tree.

When I processed all of the hints for my parents in my previous post, three of my four grandparents, as well as my mother's siblings were all added to my tree. Things are starting to build on their own. With my knowledge of these people and the documents found in my parent's hints, my confidence level is extremely high that everything we currently have in the tree is accurate.

Today, I will continue process hints for those three grandparents (and the fourth when she undoubtedly appears) to finish out the "trunk" of my family tree. I think you should now have a pretty good understanding of processing hints, so I will not go into all of the detail I did in the last post. If an unusual hint type that I haven't discussed before shows up, I will provide more information about it, but for the sake of time (since we are processing hints for more people), I will run through them on my own.

The first hint related thing I haven't touched on yet is third party sites. Ancestry sometimes sets up agreements with third party "vendors" and creates hints based on this information. While this this information is valuable in filling out your tree, you must remember that undocumented facts can sometimes be erroneous (no matter how convincing they may seem). As with public records and census information, I take these hints with a grain of salt (meaning I only accept them as corroborating data for entries that I have already inserted into my tree from solid sources. Even if you see the same information you have collected from somewhere else, it is still not documented. If I have searched far and wide and have been unable to find documentation for an entry, I will consider using this type of hint IF (and that's a big if), I have at least three unrelated sources for the information. You have to remember that third hand information like this may have been copied from the same source that your undocumented hint came from. Once such third party site is FindAGrave. This site compiles information about people in various cemeteries around the world. However, like Ancestry, this information is compiled by family history enthusiasts just like you and me (some of whom are quick to publish undocumented data). Don't get me wrong, in looking through the people contained in this site, you could find documents attached the the individuals or other information (like obituaries or information from published works) cited there that are invaluable. I'm just warning you not to take the general information from this site in higher regard than other third hand stuff.

This all came up because of a hint for my paternal grandfather. As it turns out, I can trust this particular entry due to the fact that is was create by me (yes, I try to help others by posting information about my family in multiple places). From this record, I was able to add his wife and all of my father's siblings (who have already passed away), as well as his parents (my great grandparents) to the tree. One thing you need to remember about adding data like this to your tree...often times the last names of the women are their married names and not their maiden names. You always want to track women by their maiden name in your tree so that it will be able to give you appropriate hints for that person. Also, since I know I could trust this particular entry, I was able to not only get names and relationships for all of these people, but also birth dates and death dates (along with locations) and burial locations for each of the individuals I just added to me tree.

I am now going to let you in on one of my little secrets. I like to create two parallel trees for my family. One fully documented like the one I am showing you how to build here and a second, undocumented, one into which I can accept hints that I cannot verify. By adding these undocumented hints, you will sometimes bring out another hint that is documented that you can then add to your documented tree. This tactic is particularly helpful when you run into conflicting information and cannot find any paperwork that will provide the answer you need. It is easy to go back and remove the information from your undocumented tree if you find out it was bogus information.

In summary, I finished getting my grandparents added to the tree and verifying all of their hints. I have managed to identify all four sets of great grandparents and included the siblings of my grandparents. In my next installment, I will be branching into the people I've never met (except for one when I was very young). In order to keep from getting overwhelmed with the amount of data to verify, I will probably break that process into two separate posts. If you have any questions about anything I discussed in this post, please leave me a comment. If you have any suggestions on starting a new tree, feel free to share that information in a comment, as well.

Other posts in the series:

Steps to Researching My Family History - Introduction
Steps to Researching My Family History - Step 1 - Building the Base}