Brick walls in genealogy are frustrating and we all run into them, even the professional genealogists and genealogy reference librarians. Some of my tips of the week will specifically be about breaking through brick walls, but the information is good to help keep you from running into them to!
This week’s tip: If you’ve hit a brick wall, go back and review the information you do have. You might find something you missed before, as you likely know more now than when you started. Even beginners know more than they did the first day they started research.
I like to use the personal example of when I started doing genealogy research. I was 11 years old and had no clue what to do. I had no one to show me the ropes. A local librarian suggested interviewing my living relatives and my grandparents who came to visit every summer. During their visits every year until I was about 16, I would sit around a table with all of them and ask them the same questions. Usually their responses were the same from previous years, but sometimes they remembered a new detail or realized they gave me an incorrect place in the past. When I was in college in my 20s, I took a class on North Carolina history and a project was to interview an elderly person born and raised in North Carolina. I interviewed my grandmother, it had been more than 5 years since our last interview and I discovered she was born in a completely different county than what she told me before.
Sometimes it really pays to go back over the things you’ve already done, you might be surprised what you find!
