Author: Michael

People lie about their age. When I turned twenty-eight eleventy decades ago, I decided that was a good age, and stuck with it until I was in my mid-thirties. Kids say they’re older so they can use online services such as Facebook. Adults claim they are younger for fear of ageism in the workplace.

And people have been lying about their age for centuries for a variety of reasons. That means you’ll encounter it when researching your own ancestry. So what do you do when you find records where someone’s year of birth is off? In this five-minute genealogy video, I’ll share the questions I ask when I see discrepancies in birth year on different records, and share a couple illustrative examples.

1. How likely was it that the person reporting the information knew the facts?
2. How carefully have I checked for another person with the same name?
3. Do other facts support the relationship?
4. Is there a reasonable story for the discrepancy?

I was reminded of this recently, when I broke through a brick wall with my wife’s Palatine ancestors in Pennsylvania. The wall I had broken through was Philip’s line, finding birth records for both his parents and his older siblings in the village of Neckarbischofsheim in the Palatinate.

I knew that immigration from that part of Germany at that time wasn’t just families. Portions of entire villages packed up and moved to Pennsylvania over the course of a few years, and I wondered if Jacobina could be from Neckarbischofsheim as well.
I had an 1804 church death record for Philip’s wife, Jacobina Heyl nee Zeigler, that recorded her date of birth as 1 Jun 1740. Searching for Jacobina Ziegler in the same village, turned up a baptismal record with a birthdate of 1 June 1736.
Same village as Philip Heyl, some date of birth, just four years earlier. This had to be the woman who married Philip Heyl in Philadelphia.

Back to my four questions. First, check the person reporting the information. Unfortunately, I can’t know whether the person who reported Jacobina’s death knew what they were talking about.

Second, check for similar names. I searched for birth records for women with the same name between 1730 and 1750, and found three born in September 1740, October 1741, and November 1742. But the mismatch in months didn’t feel compelling.
Third, I looked for supporting evidence the family immigrated to Pennsylvania, and found that a man with the same name as Jacobina Ziegler’s father arrived in Philly in 1751. I would have liked a little more, but its not bad.

Fourth, was the story reasonable? I think so. I have seven different primary sources showing Philip was born in 1738 or 1739, and a reliable secondary source reporting his birth on 15 September 1739. If Jacobina were born in 1736, she would be over three years older than her husband, but if she said she was born in 1740, she would be nine months younger. Even in today’s culture, it’s more common for women to marry older men. In 1740?

As another example, my second great-grandmother, Mary Shiel Gallagher, was sort of the reverse of Jacobina Ziegler. I know the story of her life from her daughter via my uncle—she was born near Swinford, Ireland, spent some time in Worcestershire, England, and then immigrated to Philadelphia. I have no idea when she was born, with different records suggestion 1844, 1849, 1851 and 1857.

Her husband wasn’t much better, with census and immigration records suggesting 1847, while his death certificate suggested 1855.

My conclusion stops with my first question: I don’t think anyone, including Mary, knew exactly when she was born.
With Jacobina Ziegler, I could use a convincing narrative about her birthdate to associate two records with different birth dates. For Mary Shiel, I have to rely on other methods—namely, oral history and her father’s name—to tie records together. The inconsistent birth years are only helpful as supporting evidence.

I found a fun video from Family History Fanatics listing seven common genealogy mistakes. I’ve made every single one of these mistakes. Except maybe this one. Or, rather, I’ve seen this advice many times, and I made a conscious choice not to follow it.
The consensus seems to be you shouldn’t put a woman’s married name in the “surname” field in your tree.

There’s a solid point here: it’s extremely rare for a woman’s maiden name to be the same as her husband’s, so putting it there may get you poor search results. It can even lead to poor assumptions.

Here’s an example I discovered: a commonly accepted genealogy of the Chew family shows that a pair of brothers, Thomas and Joseph Chew, were born to Anna Mariah and Andrew Chew. It’s all based on 1850 and 1860 census records, where Anna Mariah is living with her widowed daughter in law, Amelia, Joseph Chew’s wife. Every tree out there has Amelia’s surname recorded as Chew. Including mine.

But my tree is different from everyone else’s, because I found Joseph and Amelia’s marriage record, which listed Amelia’s maiden name as Chew. Which means than Anna Mariah may have been Amelia’s biological mother, rather than her mother-in-law.
If you follow the practice of putting married names as a woman’s maiden name, you might miss important details like this.

But if you leave that surname field blank, you’ll have another problem: lots of women with the same first name and no other obvious identifier. That’s a problem when you try to add a source & fact—you might have a dozen Elizabeths, and you can’t recall her years of birth and death off the top of your head. I mean, I have over 150 Elizabeths in my tree.

What I do when I don’t know a woman’s maiden name is put her married name in parentheses, and add “nee ?” in the suffix field. It makes her easier to find, since I at least have a surname. And in case someone else doesn’t understand my parenthetical notation, the “nee ?” should make it more obvious. I’ve seen other people put a Mrs. in the suffix field as well.

Still, I’m sorta baffled why one of the family research companies hasn’t added a feature to handle this declaratively. Give me a check mark that indicates I don’t know a woman’s maiden name. When that’s set to true (which would be the default), the surname column is disabled in the UI, and there’s an indicator (e.g. nee unknown) in search results and the like. It wouldn’t be that hard to retroactively assign the value: if the woman’s surname name doesn’t equal her husband’s surname (trimming whitespace, ignoring case, and normalizing rare characters such as vowels with umlauts), set it to “known”, otherwise “unknown.” But you could have a tri-state as well, with a null or grayed out checkbox reflecting legacy values.

I found a fun video from Family History Fanatics listing seven common genealogy mistakes. I’ve made every single one of these mistakes, and developed some guidelines for avoiding them.

The third mistake is relying on other people’s trees, and here are my principles for how I make use of other trees on ancestry.com, familysearch.org, etc.

I group all genealogical sources into three types: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary. Primary source documents are created contemporaneously with a given event.

Secondary source documents are detailed analyses written after the event—sometimes centuries after—and are based on explicitly cited primary source documents.

Tertiary sources are summaries of family research without supporting citations.

Family trees on the web could be either secondary or tertiary sources, but you should handle them exactly the same way:

• Don’t cite other trees, use them as roadmaps to do your own research.
• When choosing a roadmap, look for ancestor profiles with unique contributions and high fact counts.
• Be careful who you trust: a high-quality researcher may not have high quality research throughout their tree.
• A DNA match doesn’t prove your paper trail.

First, the person who created the tree had good intentions. They’re not lying, they’re not fabricating facts out of thin air. They want to get this right. But they’re human, and they make honest mistakes. One confusing record could have led them to jump to conclusions, and the end result is an erroneous tree. Point is, examine their research, use it as a roadmap. If they did it right, you can speed up your work substantially. And if they made a mistake, maybe you can catch it.

Second, you’ll probably find a bunch of profiles for your ancestor. Most of them will be nearly identical, because people often just copy from other trees and move on. So just pick one tree profile as a roadmap. I prefer profiles that have high source count, assuming they are primary sources. If I see lots of millennium file and American genealogical biographical index records, I move on. If I see the genealogist added scanned images of probate files or other primary source documents, that makes me feel I’ve got a solid roadmap.

Third, once you’ve dug into your own tree pretty deeply, you’ll find other researchers who consistently land quality work. Michelle Fury and Dan Perry are my favorites for my mother’s family, and I hope others have come to rely on my research into the Slough family in the 1700s and 1800s. Thing is, I know that my quality research only applies to specific people and lines in my tree. Other parts of my tree? Not so much. Lots of fact copying with little more than census records and find-a-grave sources. Point is, even when you trust the researcher, you should examine their work on each profile.

Final point, I see a lot of people claim that their written-record-based genealogy is “confirmed by DNA” when they get a DNA match to someone else with the same written-record-based genealogy. But you could both have the exact same error in your trees.

For example, I have this one family in my wife’s tree that sprouted from a single guy in Jamestown, John Chew. Everyone has a record-based lineage that connects my wife’s tree to John’s youngest son, but… the DNA matches before a particular generation (about 1800) were all to people descending from the eldest son. Turns out the record-based lineage might be wrong because in 1820, my wife’s fifth great uncle, Joseph Chew married a woman named Emily Chew, and the record-based lineage was completely dependent on the assumption that Emily’s maiden name was not Chew at all. Whoa.

You could also have a false positive—whether it’s via a genetically isolated community sharing common indicators, or just by chance.  And… let’s get real, hanky-panky wasn’t invented in the past one hundred years. People have been sleeping around since before some human came up with the idea of marriage. I keep looking at my wife’s paternal DNA matches, and can’t find a single tree/DNA match past her third great-grandfather.  DNA matches are not infallible evidence of a paper-and-pencil lineage.

I found a fun video from Family History Fanatics listing seven common genealogy mistakes. I’ve made every single one of these mistakes and have developed some guidelines for avoiding them.

The final mistake in that video was about assuming a connection to famous people based on a common surname. You definitely shouldn’t try to make a connection to a famous person, or any person for that matter, by trying to bridge a gap between them—you’ll find a way to overlook contrary evidence.

But there’s another potential pitfall here: semi-famous people in history—that is, b-list people who generally aren’t named in history books but who associated with influential people—can exert a sort of gravitational pull, drawing you into a mistake just because there are soooooo many records.

The point is, be suspicious anytime you see a flood of information about a famous or even semi-famous person who appears organically through your research. You might be related, but your true relative might also be concealed by that flood of data. Let me give you an example: Jacob Slough of Pennsylvania. His father, Matthias Slough, was a b-list figure in the Revolution. He corresponded with George Washington, hosted a lot of Pennsylvania’s leadership at his tavern in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and held a few minor public offices in the colony.

Matthias used his connections to advance the interests of his children, acquiring land in Pennsylvania’s backcountry for his sons, and helping Jacob get a commission as an Army Lieutenant. Jacob served in the Northwest Indian War and was injured in combat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, so he created quite a paper trail all on his own.

The challenge for genealogists is that we work backward. Let’s say you have an ancestor named William Slough and family oral history tells that his father was named Jacob.

When you start looking in Pennsylvania, you find a lot of records for Matthias’s son, Jacob Slough. I have twenty-two facts from Ancestry.com indices on his profile and I added five more from external sources along with thirty-five images. He and his brother George appeared in so many land records that I even stopped taking notes.

Even if I think that my William’s father is a different Jacob Slough—and there were twenty Pennsylvanians with that name living in Pennsylvania before 1800—Matthias’s son appears so frequently in indexed searches, it’s hard to see anyone else. It’s not like I and many others went looking to connect ourselves to someone famous. We just get pulled in by the subtle, inexorable gravitational force of all those records. Jacob had the added difficulty of not having any children with his wife. That made him a blank slate, especially since baptismal records for the early 1800s are not that easy to find. So as long as I don’t find evidence that Jacob had a son named William who was obviously a different William than mine, it was just too easy to say my William is Jacob’s son.

Be suspicious!

The United States used to be a country of newspapers. Just about every town had one, and they all made money, not only by selling newspapers, but by selling advertising. In fact, some newspapers only made money by selling advertising, distributing copies for free.
Advertising didn’t just mean ads for businesses: People paid money to announce births, marriages, deaths, and sometimes even the comings and goings of their family. To find those, you’re going to need a good idea of dates, the name of the town, a healthy dose of patience, and a little luck.

I’m Mike O’Neill, and in this video, I’m going to cover how to search for newspaper items of genealogical value in just five minutes.
If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to find what you need on one of the big websites that index and image old papers: I prefer GenealogyBank.com, but Newspapers.com is good as well. And that’s where you should start, of course.

But the numbers aren’t good. Newspapers.com touts more than 7,400 newspapers, but there are over 19k towns & cities in the U.S., and another 15k unincorporated communities. You can bet most of those towns had at least one newspaper at some point.

Just consider my hometown, Princeton, which has two newspapers today: the Town Topics & The Princeton Packet. Then there are two small regional papers, the Trenton Times and the Trentonian, which cover the Trenton metro area, which includes Princeton. I could go even further: when I worked on a congressional campaign for New Jersey’s 12th district, we followed a dozen newspapers which covered central New Jersey news, including dailies from Philadelphia and New York City.

Finding the little paper that covered your ancestor’s town may take some work, so you should be willing to

1. call up existing papers and local libraries to find out where microfilms are kept.
2. use inter-library loans to get microfilms, &
3. work with small volunteer historical societies that made the effort to preserve their local paper.

Let’s take an example from my own research: finding a 1929 obituary from Crofton, Nebraska—current population 726. I had no luck with newspapers.com or genealogybank.com, so I searched the web, and discovered the Crofton Journal. I rang them up (it took a few calls) and was told that the paper was in business back in 1929. They suggested the local library. I called them, and they let me know that the Nebraska State Historical Society was my best bet. And they were: I got the obituary I was looking for.

I’ve since learned that Family Search’s Research Wiki is a good resource for identifying repositories and records for a given location. In the case of Crofton, the wiki points right to the Nebraska State Historical Society.

You should also take a swing at worldcat.org once you know the name of the paper you want. Worldcat combines thousands of library catalogs into one database. In some cases, the publication you’ll want only exists on microfilm. Take the information you found on worldcat to your local library, and ask them to obtain the microfilm via interlibrary loan.

I found a fun video from Family History Fanatics listing seven common genealogy mistakes. I’ve made every single one of these mistakes, and have some guidelines for avoiding them. In this video, I’ll cover my principles for handling different spellings of names, especially surnames.

I have five things I think about when looking at name variations:

1. It’s the sound, not the spelling.
2. Ignore duplicate letters and silent vowels.
3. Drop the vowels, focus on the consonants.
4. Drop the consonants, focus on similar sounds.
5. Consider the possibility of anglicization.

First, the written word is an imperfect reflection of speech. It doesn’t reflect the vast majority of human communication, which is via body language and tone. There’s also nothing sacred about how a sound is represented in writing: my named is spelled Michael in the Latin alphabet, but those sounds are just as easily expressed in the Arabic alphabet مايكل. In other words, I could spell my name Mykul and it would sound the same.

Second rule is to ignore letters that don’t add a sound. Consider my surname O’Neill, which is sometimes spelled with O’Neil with one l, and rarely O’Neille with a silent e. Today, that’s three different names but the sound is identical and that’s what you key on. Third rule, drop the vowels. Let’s take Devaney and Divine, Divinney and Devane? Are they the same surname?

When you drop the vowels from all of those variants, you get three very clear consonant sounds: D-V-N. Now, I can mimic potential accents just by varying vowel sounds between those letters and see what sounds similar. Whether I have an a, e, i or u between the D and the V, it sounds about the same. Between the V and the N, the sounds represented by a, e or i work pretty well, too. The last vowel, after the N is a bit trickier though, with the ey/ee/eh sounds working, but not much else. The whole exercise yields at least twenty-four different spellings that yield very similar sounds. More important, the eh sound shortens the vowel, and gets me to Divine.

Dropping the vowels isn’t always enough: you also have to think about consonant sounds that are similar. Take baseball hall of fame pitcher Stanley Coveleski. If you limit yourself to the consonants C-V-L-S-K you could lose him. The C could be represented by a K or even a hard G. The sound represented by V in many languages is interchangeable with W. And the vowel sounds could by modified by W or Y. My final thought here is thinking about the impact of cultural assimilation.

As an example, think about ethnic German immigrants to Colonial Pennsylvania. The first generation of immigrants segregated themselves from the “English” because of language and cultural barriers, probably living near people from their same village in the Rhineland. Their children would have learned English language and culture more easily, eventually acting as go-betweens when necessary. The grandchildren might attend different churches than the Quakers, perhaps speak some German, but their identity would more closely align to their Pennsylvania community than to their grandparents’ village in the Rhineland. Along the way, an easy-to-say German name such as Schlauch would become cumbersome for descendants raised speaking English, and they would simplify to Slough.

Same goes for Stanley Coveleski: he was born Stanislaus, but adopted the anglicized Stanley. Patriotic pressures can also play a role: in my research, I saw a sharp rate of anglicizing names across all ethnicities after the Revolution, and a more limited Anglicization amongst Germans and Eastern Europeans during World War I.

Standardization of spelling on names is actually a recent phenomenon, and it’s a function both of increased literacy and of government programs. The former is pretty obvious: if you go back to Colonial period, you didn’t go to school, you apprenticed to learn a trade, whether it was farming from your parents, or as an apprentice blacksmith. If your trade didn’t require literacy, then you weren’t literate—or your literacy was limited to snippets of the bible. One-room school houses didn’t pop up until well into the 1800s. The latter… governments keep records for taxation and benefits, and when you have countrywide benefits programs such as social security and Medicare, you have to have a certain level of standardization and consistency to avoid fraud. When you don’t you have those programs, your name can vary without any real consequences. In other words, the further back you go from the 1930s in the U.S., the more you’ll see spelling variation.

You can roughly group all genealogical sources into three types: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary.

Secondary source documents are detailed analyses written after the event—sometimes centuries after—based on explicitly cited primary source documents. When I say explicitly cited, I mean that there are footnotes and endnotes. LOTS of them. Pages of them.
I don’t run into secondary sources very frequently: while there are lots of write-ups of family histories, I haven’t encountered many that bother with citations. Of those that do, the footnotes are too sparse to document all the facts.

When I do find secondary sources, my rule of thumb is to spot check the author’s work for several people. Once I feel confident of the quality of the research, I’ll cite the secondary source directly when obtaining the original documents is too difficult.
This is pretty similar to my principles for tertiary sources, which are summaries of family research without supporting citations. The key difference here is that, while I use both secondary and tertiary sources as roadmaps, I’m willing to directly cite a secondary source once I have confidence in the quality of the research.

The threshold, for me, is when it’s obvious to me that the researcher has gone above & beyond what I can accomplish from my living room.

Let me give you an example: “Our Raser Family” by Edward John Raser. My father-in-law handed me a copy of this book when I first started digging into my wife’s ancestry.

This 261-page single-name study of Rasers in the United States has an additional 66 pages of appendices which include full transcriptions of probate files, real estate documents, family bibles, and stories told by his distant cousins; detailed sources of each family photo and illustration presented in the book, and 22 pages of Greek-text end notes. It represents Edward Raser’s life work, condensing sixty-seven years of research into a single, 374-page tome.

I’ve used this book as a roadmap to my wife’s paternal tree, and for every person in it, Edward not only has the standard records I can find on Ancestry, but a bunch of other hard-to-find resources such as century-old letters and family bibles. At this point, I have such high confidence in Edward’s work, I’ll just cite a page in the book if I can’t find a primary source myself.

Where can you find secondary sources? I consistently run into them in two places:

• One is the Daughters of the American Revolution. You can order full lineages from their site, and those include all the citations used in the application. Mind you, the older the application, the lower the standard of proof.
• You can also find them in old genealogy magazines and the like. Ancestry.com has quite a few digitized and indexed.

You can roughly group all genealogical sources into three types: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary.

In this video, I’m going to give a quick, five-minute overview of tertiary source documents, which are summaries of family research without supporting citations. Quick version: assume good intent, but know the author made mistakes. You should use their research as a roadmap to find their sources, and double-check every part of their work.

You can roughly group all genealogical sources into three types: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary.

Primary source documents are created contemporaneously with a given event. Secondary source documents are detailed analyses written after the event—sometimes centuries after—and are based on explicitly cited primary source documents.

When I review tertiary sources, I follow my principles for genealogy research. First, the person who created the source had good intentions. They’re not lying, they’re not fabricating facts out of thin air. They want to get this right. Second, despite their best efforts, they’re human. They make honest mistakes. They might have misunderstood the record, confused it with another person, or even presented a guess from another researcher as fact.

To put it another way, you shouldn’t trust tertiary sources to have the facts correct, but you can use them to retrace someone else’s steps to help speed up your search.

Let’s look at two examples of tertiary sources.

First, the genealogy of Jacob Esher Heyl contained in Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania, and published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1911. I was specifically interested in Philip Heyl, an ancestor of my wife and a Philadelphia baker who fought at the Battle of Princeton in January of 1777. The source gives his birth and death dates, and that’s enough to find a primary source noting his date of death, as well as a will which proves his connection to the Raser family.

Let’s take an example where assuming good intent will lead you astray: Eugene Singer’s “A Singer Family of Colonial Vermont and Canada.” First self-published in 1996, Singer’s work was the only published genealogy of the George Slough who married and had a family in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s, and died in Ontario, Canada around 1811.

Singer asserted that George Slough was the eldest son of J. Philip Schlauch and A. Margaretha Hertzel of Northampton County, Pennsylvania—their son was of the right age and came from Pennsylvania.

Philip died intestate in the 1750s, and the Orphan’s Court record notes that their eldest son, George, made claim to the estate in 1759. Singer wrote that in 1769, George’s younger brother, “Jacob Slough petitioned the court for division of their father’s estate. It is a matter of record that George did not participate in this event.” Singer then writes that the genealogy upon which he relied states that “George had ‘probably died’ since there was no further record.”

At point, Singer’s genealogy goes a bit pear-shaped, and he alleges that George Slough didn’t really die, he was just presumed dead by the Orphan’s Court. Singer says that George had just “moved out” because of his wicked stepfather, and was living seventy-miles away in Berks County, Pennsylvania.

Singer’s work gives you a roadmap to retrace his steps, and the directions point to Hannah Benner Roach’s 1966 genealogy of the Herzel family published in the Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine. I found that article on Ancestry.com, and it notes that Philip Schlauch & Margaret Hertzel’s son George “died unmarried and without issue.”

Taking it a step further, I found Philip Schlauch’s probate record on familysearch.org, where the contemporary record notes that “George the eldest son (who died since without Iʄsue).”

Let’s assume good intentions: Singer found Roach’s article in the 1980s or early 1990s, mis-wrote his notes, and came to the wrong conclusion. But he provided enough information in his work to retrace his steps. And with that I could conclude that he made a mistake. There were two men name George Slough of about the same age living in Pennsylvania. One died around 1760, the other moved to Canada and died in 1811.

The George Slough who died in Canada was probably born in Germany, and considering how many George Sloughs there were in Colonial Pennsylvania, it can be tough to separate them out.

Intestate probate proceedings can be one of the most valuable primary source genealogical documents out there because the proceedings are governed strictly by law. Problem is, the laws may not make sense to you, and they can be hard to find.
In this entry, I’m going to give you a case study of how the actual text of Virginia’s intestate laws resolved a tough genealogy problem. This is a quick summary of a more detailed article I posted a couple years ago.

It started with my wife’s ancestor, Julia Chew, wife of Thomas Chew (1801-1879). According to her tombstone, she was born on 2 March 1804, and various records put her birthplace in in Virginia.

The consensus was that Julia’s maiden name was Huggins. As always, I assumed good intent when looking at secondary and tertiary sources—that is, other people’s research—and I found a March 1835 probate proceeding in Highland County, Ohio for a William Huggins who named two daughters, July Chew & Thirza Hancher, as well as a son Doctor Benjamin Franklin M. Huggins.

Fun fact: Doctor wasn’t a title, it was actually the poor guy’s first name. What a mouthful.

Anyway, the probate file noted that William owned land in Frederick County, Virginia.

Julia and Thomas spent most of their lives in Highland County, Ohio and in Indiana, but they started their married lives in Virginia, where their first three children were born between 1826 and 1830. So… they were probably married in or around Frederick County, Virginia where Julia’s dad owned land! Right? Right?

There is a record of an 1823 marriage bond in Frederick County, Virginia for a Thomas Chew, but here’s where the problem started. Thomas married a Julia Minser, not Julia Huggins. The bondsman—a role typically held by a close family member such as a father—was William Huggins, so I felt this had to be the right record. I looked for a record of a Julia Huggins marrying a man named Minser, and couldn’t find one.

I could walk away and say I’ve got it, I know the father. But… it just felt weird. When I hit a problem, a brick wall, I’ve found that one of the best ways to punch through is to examine siblings.

I discovered the name of Thirza’s deceased husband, Barton Hancher, in extended wrangling over William Huggins’ will.

Barton was from Berkeley County, adjacent to Frederick County. And in Frederick County, I found an 1832 bond for the marriage of Barton Hancher to Thirza Minser, with Franklin Higgins as the bondsman—that has to be Doctor Benjamin Franklin M. Huggins, right?

So… that’s really weird. William Huggins named both women as his daughters, but there’s no way that both women had first married a man named Minser before remarrying to Thomas Chew and Barton Hancher respectively.

At this point, I was totally confused, so I started looking around for Minsers in the Frederick area for any clues. And I found one: a fellow named Brad Minser had found a will abstract for a Rebecca Minson naming “Thomas Chin & his wife” and attached it to his ancestor, Rebecca Hancher Minser. The abstract also named “George P. Chrisman & his wife”—Thirza, widowed in 1835, married George P. Chrisman in 1837 in Highland County, Ohio.

Then I looked back at William Huggins’ will. It actually named a Wm. Minser in relation to some debts, and lo and behold, Brad Minser’s tree listed William Minser as son of Rebecca Hancher Minser.

This has to be all the same family, but there’s no explanation to why Thirza and Julia appear with the wrong maiden name. Or why they would appear in the probate proceeding of a Rebecca Minser receiving shares in her estate equal to Rebecca’s kids.

So I went back to my principles: always read the original. The abstract Brad Minser had posted listed Books 23 and 25 of Frederick County Will Books as containing the full probate proceeding. I ordered microfilms of those books from the Family History Library, and discovered that Rebecca hadn’t named Julia Chew and Thirza Chrisman in her will. She had died intestate, and since both women received shares equal to Rebecca’s other children, they had to have been her daughters. I also saw the transcription error—it wasn’t Thomas Chin in the original, it was Thomas Chew.

Both women were born well after Rebecca’s husband, Jacob Minser died, so he couldn’t be the father. William Huggins claimed both women were his daughters, but he and Rebecca never married.

My new hypothesis? William and Rebecca “cohabited without formalities.” Or to put it in the lingo of the 1800s, Julia and Thirza were bastards.

Intestacy is strictly governed by law, so the law itself could prove my hypothesis. I got my hands on an 1857 guide book for Virginia probate law, and got a clear answer. And I quote “Bastards also shall be capable of inheriting on the part of their mother, in like manner as if they had been lawfully begotten of such mother.”

At the time, bastards carried their mothers’ surname, even when the father was known. Put it all together, and it explains why Julia’s and Thirza’s maiden names were Minser, not Huggins.

Final point: Doctor Benjamin Franklin M. Huggins didn’t receive a share of Rebecca Minser’s estate, and that means he had a different mother than Julia and Thirza. Not that I have had any luck figuring out who.

Probate documents can be goldmines for genealogical research, few documents are both digitized and indexed, so expect to put in some real effort to find these.

In this video, I’ll cover how to find things in digitized probate records once you find the repository. I’ve covered finding the repository in a previous entry.

Short version:

1. Not every death results in a probate record.
2. Start with digitally indexed repositories, but….
3. Expect to browse through hand-written indices in digitized court records, and
4. Always include a source citation.

Before we get too far, it’s really important to remind yourself that not every death results in probate records. For example, a person who lived hand-to-mouth isn’t going to make out a will. Wills made out by people without debts or real estate might not need to be recorded with the county court—the executor could just distribute the assets.

So, with that in mind, start you search on Ancestry.com or another site where probate records are digitally indexed by name of decedent.

I wish it were that easy, but it’s pretty rare when I can find what want via a digital index. That’s when it’s time to start browsing through images. I prefer doing this on FamilySearch.org because the site just feels well suited to browsing. You’ll need to create a free account, but after that, just search in the catalog for the county you need. let’s look at Lancaster Cty, Pennsylvania for sources where the author is something like “Pennsylvania. Orphan’s Court” rather than a person’s name.

We’re looking for Jacob Slough, and Lancaster county conveniently has an index off wills. Indexes can be sorted in many methods, and this is my favorite: it uses the first letter of the surname, the first letter of the forename, and the year of the document. Why? Well, surname spellings can vary—I’ve seen a dozen different variants of Slough—so just having the first letter makes it much easier. I find the J’s, and there is Jacob from 1750. Note down the book and page—that’s book A page 204. You’ll have to jump around a bit to find the right page to find it Jacob’s 1750 will.

That county’s records appear straightforward, but wills are just one type of probate record. I’ve got some videos on the types of documents involved in probate, but the quick version is that intestate administrations, inventories and other documents should exist elsewhere.

Take Belmont County, Ohio. This is a much bigger list of documents than in Lancaster county, and the index is much more complicated than in Lancaster. The case number here is pretty important: Belmont County put most probate records into files by decedent, though wills are still recorded chronologically in books.

If you’re extracting images from FamilySearch.org to add to your tree on another site—I bring them over to ancestry.com—there’s a really critical step. When you copy the image, make sure you also copy the citation text in the Information tab and include that in the metadata of the image. If you forget to do that and have a need to revisit the docs, you don’t want to go browsing through FamilySearch again.