Find your Ancestors for Free part 4

Sorry it's been a few days since posts 1,2 and 3, but as I said last time, today I'm going to talk about names.

Remember when searching that the exactness of a name is not all that important. Be open to different spellings, wrong spellings, nick names, middle names, wrong initials etc. If more then one person has the name in a family, one may use a middle name or a nickname, also very often census takers would guess on the spelling of names particularly odd names. For example my  3rd great grandmother was named Calista Yager Jones, however in the censuses it spelled Calista, calsta, cista, calistia and more. With that in mind you may be wondering how you can ever be sure, and that's where the rest of the family and dates come in to play. Remember I told you too write down everyone in the family and their ages, this is where you use that information. If you aren't sure it's them, use the other names and dates to compare and see if it is actually the same family.

That's first names, but let's look at family names. Those also get written wrong or sometimes even changed. My great grandmothers family was from Germany and there last name was Wiese, it has however been misspelled as Weise or Wise. On the other hand simple names such as Johnson could actually have started out as Johnston or Johanson. One interesting thing to note about family names is that within countries certain family names or more common in particular areas. For instance, here is a web-sight for German family names and when you search a name it tells you what the population density in each region is of people who bear that name. And here is a map of Ireland that tells the general areas that go with each family name. There are many other such resources as before mentioned, Google is your friend.

Now for a note on ships records and passenger lists. The best sight I have found for this is Olive Tree Genealogy, it's not particularly user friendly but it does have a lot of ships lists an they are free. Now remember one thing, even if you are sure your ancestors came from say Germany and landed in Philadelphia that doesn't mean they will definitely be on a list that say such and such ship arriving in Philadelphia from Germany on such and such date. They may have or they might have taken a ship to England and then on to America or they might have gone through France and then boarded a ship. So when looking for these records I advise you to be very open. my advice is if you have a year or year range and what city they arrived in that is where I would start. Another example generic random tidbit, always read the actual document if you can. I'll give you an example of why this is important, my great grandmothers two sisters on one census when asked where they were from answered, Neümunster rather than Germany, later on the census taker wrote Germany beside it but when the information was entered into the database it was only put in as Germany. So you see if I hadn't actually looked at the document I might never have discovered what area of Germany they came from.

One other thing to remember is that borders change with time, and it can be worth the effort to look up old maps no mater if you are looking in the US or abroad. On my fathers side for example the family was from West Virginia, but as we went farther back we noticed that it had changed to just Virginia. We began to wonder why they moved and as we examined the map we realized that the family hadn't moved at all, it was the state lines that had been moved. Another example in Europe, on my mothers said in the Wellman family it was said that they came from Wales, however people argued that there are no Wellmans. Later on someone else pointed out a that the Wales of the 15-1600's is not the Wales we know today, and that at that time it covered most of the southwestern end of the Island. Making it perfectly possible for him to have come from what was at that time known as Wales.

Happy Hunting! And remember don't hesitate to ask me any questions.