It is the end of an intractable year and this post is in the spirit of seasonal giving; no matter how stuck we get on our own family, we are all in a position to help others. Despite everything, 2020 had a few highlights for me, and unsurprisingly, almost all of them involved breaking down genealogical brick walls. However, only one brick wall was among my own ancestors (thank you to the National Archives UK for free downloads!). The others were cases where I came across the magical tidbit of evidence that broke through to further generations or specific origin locations for the ancestors of strangers.
In one case I was helping a fourth cousin by reading through NY land records and I came across a well described family group, with sons-in-law listed, in a very small town in frontier NY state in the early 1800s. I checked google and FamilySearch and discovered that one of the daughters was the most distant point on a FamilySearch one tree lineage. She had died in the midwest, birth location New York state, and her parents and hometown were unknown. The will I was looking at in a county land registration book proved who her parents and siblings were as well as her town of origin. I updated her profile on FamilySearch, adding the other relatives, and linking to the documentation.
In the same way a document with a detailed family group (particularly including in-laws) can link up people currently stranded on the tree without specific origin information, researching cemetery plots often reconstructs more complete family groups (a better and more distinctive entity to research than an individual) and thereby enables the research identifying their origins. In the best case scenarios a gravestone or cemetery registry includes birth location, even when all other records do not. I do comprehensive research for specific cemeteries on FindAGrave and many origin towns in England, Scotland, and Ireland were successfully identified and publicly posted on the FamilySearch one tree and FindAGrave this year. In one case someone submitted an edit request that did not look right, and in researching and checking what was going on, the US and English origins of two separate Ontario families was solved and posted for their descendants to see.
Inevitably, we come across evidence that is not relevant to our own trees but we may have dug up someone else's treasure. If you are reviewing an obscure or difficult to access source, keep an eye out for information that might break any brick wall; whenever a family group is described with any differentiating detail, it is good to search for them on the FamilySearch tree (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/find/name) and on FindAGrave and to add the information you have uncovered. For people not yet on the tree, it can take a few minutes of research to look for members of a more recent generation and then to build backwards, but it is worth doing. Some of my most positive genealogy interactions in this otherwise terrible year came about because of a few extra minutes of work here or there that made all the difference to another genealogy community member.
Best wishes for all in 2021!
