RLP 132: Grafting Family Branches Part 2

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 132 Grafting Family Branches, part two.Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go, Hi everyone. And welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of Research Like a Pro, and I’m here with accredited genealogist and cohost, Diana Elder. Hi Diana.

Diana (56s):
Hi, Nicole. I’m looking forward to our discussion on the podcast today.

Nicole (1m 2s):
What have you been working on lately?

Diana (1m 5s):
I did a bunch of RootsTech videos. Maybe our listeners don’t know, but RootsTech is going virtual this year and it’s free for everybody. So if you haven’t signed up yet, you can go register. And I have got a lot of videos on there. This year they only wanted 20 minute videos because they’ve found that, I guess our attention span is getting worse, and that’s what people really watched when they were watching the hour long ones, they’d watch for 20 minutes and then be done. So we’re only doing 20 minute videos, but I had two or three proposals that were accepted that were an hour long, and I broke those up into parts.

Diana (1m 45s):
So crazy as it might seem, I ended up doing 18 videos and some of those are just little short five minute ones, because you can do those as well. So I kind of had a crazy few weeks getting all those recorded and submitted.

Nicole (1m 57s):
It was crazy and I only had six, but yeah, those little five minute videos were kind of fun. They’re called tips and tricks videos, and we were able to submit several of those. So it was fun to have the opportunity to share a few little tips and then to do a couple normal class sessions as well. And of course the 20 minute time limit was difficult to meet because typically we present a lecture that’s an hour long. So it just forced me to say things very concisely

Diana (2m 29s):
Me too. And I had to rerecord a few things because I tend to, to ramble and I was over my time limit. So I had to do some rerecording at times, but that’s okay. I think those videos are going to be fun. And from what we understand, they will be available for a whole year. So you don’t have to watch everything in three days. You’ll have time to space it out and see a variety of content. So I think it’s going to be kind of revolutionary how RootsTech is putting this all together from what I’ve seen.

Nicole (3m 2s):
Yeah. I’m pretty excited to see how it goes. All right. Well, our announcements for the day are to join our newsletter to make sure you get our weekly Monday email with coupons and deals and new blog posts and episodes of the podcast. And then also our Research Like a Pro with DNA online course is out. So check that out on our website.

Diana (3m 25s):
We’re excited about that. And if you don’t know much about our courses, it’s just work as you go, so you get to decide if you’re going to spend a day, a week, a month, whatever, on each module. And then we have our monthly office hours, which are really fun because you can submit your own questions and then come on the live zoom call. And we talk about your question and we get ideas from everybody who’s there. And so you can get some really good ideas just on your specific research problems. So we really enjoy meeting up with our course people on our office hours that are every month. So let’s talk a little bit about the previous episode, which is leading us to this episode.

Diana (4m 8s):
We are talking all about caring for your family tree and how to make sure that those generational links are correct. And this whole podcast, and article that I wrote about it, all came from Nicole and I attaching the wrong ancestor, years and years ago when we were beginning genealogists, we had decided that our ancestor, Melissa Elizabeth Welch had parents of Meredith and Susanna Welch in South Carolina based on one document, and that was the 1850 census that had an Elizabeth Welch of the right age in South Carolina.

Diana (4m 51s):
And then years later, Nicole discovered that that was incorrect. And so we’re going to talk all about how the research process that we teach the RLP process can really help figure out these mistakes that we’ve made in our genealogy, or as we’re doing new research to make sure we’re doing correct Genealogy.

Nicole (5m 13s):
Yep. It was exciting to find the correct parents because then we could have the right people on our family tree and extend that line back correctly.

Diana (5m 21s):
Yeah. I think there’s always that feeling like, oh man, what have I done when, you discover a mistake. But I’m pretty sure that there is nobody alive that has an absolutely perfect family tree, whether it’s an incorrect ancestor or just a date or a place, you know what I mean? It’s the past. And we’re just relying on the documents that have survived. And of course we’re going to make mistakes and that’s okay. We just need to learn how to correct them and how to verify. So in this episode, we’re going to go through the RLP process and use it to show how we discovered correct information on our gal. So our objective for this was to discover and document the parents of Melissa Elizabeth Welch born 10, September, 1844 in Sumpter county, South Carolina, and died 5 January 1887 in Cameron, Milam county, Texas, Melissa married, John Christian Harris on 27, July, 1865 in Burleson county, Texas.

Diana (6m 25s):
So we have a lot of information in there, dates and places. But when we started, we really only had one record. We started with the death certificate of my great-grandfather, where he named his mother as Elizabeth Welch. But after we’ve created an objective, you know, we’ve got this objective to really verify parents, then what’s the next thing that we do?

Nicole (6m 49s):
Analyze the timeline.

Diana (6m 52s):
Yeah. And we have to go through all of our sources and really analyze for the source and information and evidence. So when we look at the sources, we want to really think about, you know, are they original? Are they derivative? Are they authored? So in this case I had an original source for her parents and it was actually from the John C. Harris family Bible. This is one of those exciting things that happened when we were communicating with other researchers and another researcher had a scan of the original page. And I remember getting that email and it was so exciting that a family Bible is an interesting source because it is original.

Diana (7m 36s):
You know, it’s the first time it’s written down possibly ever. And especially in Texas where they didn’t do birth certificates or any kind of birth records, a family Bible might be the only recording of a birth, but was this Bible created at the time of her birth? Well, no, it wasn’t. It was done many, many years later. So it makes the information a little bit less reliable. What do you think about that, Nicole?

Nicole (8m 4s):
Yeah, there’s so much to talk about with family Bible. It’s an original source. I always just try to think, is it the first time this was recorded or was somebody transcribing it or translating it or copying it? So if you have the actual images of the Bible pages, that’s original, and then the information you have to know who the person is that is writing the family information. So sometimes you don’t know with the Bible. Did we know in this case?

Diana (8m 32s):
No, we did not know. We had no idea. I kind of think it was one of the younger daughters, because you can always look at the handwriting and the handwriting was all the same. So it was obvious. All this information was written down at the same time, the same ink, the same handwriting, and the last person listed was Dock Harris, my ancestor and he was born in 1886. So all the people that were born before that they were just included in this list. So it was at least after 1886 that this record was made. But I really don’t know who would have been writing it down

Nicole (9m 13s):
And sometimes you can tell by who has the Bible, so which cousin has it. And you can look at their line back to the common ancestor and see which child they descend through and kind of ask them where they got the pages from or that kind of thing. And that’s been a successful way in the past to kind of figure it out.

Diana (9m 29s):
Yeah, that’s a really good point. The trouble with this one was it was just images of pages. And you can see that they’re not even in the Bible anymore. Somebody had taken them out of the Bible and then digitized them. So somebody just had these loose pages in their records and the images were being passed around through the family genealogists.

Nicole (9m 52s):
So the Bible itself, the pages were about the John C. Harris and Melissa family. So those two are the parents and then it listed all of their children, right? So it didn’t tell us anything about Melissa’s parents, right?

Diana (10m 7s):
Nothing. And it listed her name as Melissa Harris and it gave the actual birth date of September 10th, 1844. But this one did not give a place, that came from the census, as this one just gave us a specific date of her birth. So, you know, you would imagine that would be probably one of the older daughters that knew her mother’s birth year. And her father probably was still alive. He didn’t die till 1915. And she knew all the birth dates of all the children. So that would be my guess, but I, of course can’t verify that, but here’s an interesting thing before I got these original pages, I got a derivative source and that derivative source was another researcher who had made a copy of these family Bible pages and she had written everything out, but the interesting thing about her derivative copy of that family Bible was she had done some annotations.

Diana (11m 7s):
She had made some little notes on it, and I thought that was really interesting. So could this be a clue because the notes were by Ruth M. Harris and she was the youngest child of John Harris by his third wife. So not even Melissa’s daughter, but John’s daughter. So that makes me wonder if maybe she was possibly the one that has the Bible pages. I don’t know. It’s such a mystery to know who actually compiled the Bible, but this Ruth, who was the youngest child had done the transcription.

Nicole (11m 46s):
That’s really neat. So after Melissa died, John C. Harris got married again, and then he got married a third time and the third wife, her children had the Bible?

Diana (11m 58s):
I think maybe so.

Nicole (11m 59s):
That makes sense. It was probably in the possession of John T. Harris.

Diana (12m 3s):
Yeah. So this younger daughter has some notes, her notes from the transcription, she notes who the father was, and she notes who was married, and their children. So I think that’s an interesting thing too, to think about that a derivative source can have errors enter in, for instance, for Melissa’s name instead of writing Welch, she thought it was Wilch. So she transcribed it as W-I, but looking at the original to me, it looks more like an E. So that’s something we always have to take into consideration that with a derivative source, it could be some errors, but then you also have these annotations and notes, which can give you more clues about the actual record.

Diana (12m 48s):
That’s cool. Anyway, the Bible pages and the transcription are kind of fun sources to analyze and look at.

Nicole (12m 54s):
Yeah, they really are. You know, the death date of Melissa Welch being 1887, right after Doc was born in 1886. Is there any chance she could have written the births of her own children before she died?

Diana (13m 8s):
Maybe, maybe that is always a possibility. And if we had the actual Bible, we could look at the date that it was published and see when they would have purchased it maybe, but without that, you can’t tell that. So I don’t know my feeling is that it was probably later, but I, I don’t know.

Nicole (13m 28s):
It is interesting though, to look at the handwriting and see that it’s all consistent, and that was a really good clue. So good job.

Diana (13m 34s):
Yeah, because I do have another Bible record where the ink is different handwriting is different and you can clearly see different people adding information to the Bible. So if anyone has a Bible record, there are some things that you can really look at, to better analyze that. Well, let’s go on and talk about an authored source, and this is a family story or a biographical sketch. It can be an online family tree or research report, any of those things. And we are seeing a lot of those types of sources on the online trees, especially Ancestry, anytime you write something and upload it to your tree, it’ll probably show up as a hint and somebody else’s tree for that person and they can attach it.

Diana (14m 20s):
Nicole, I’ve seen some of your life sketches that you’ve uploaded and copied into other trees. That’s all, I’ll see, there’s a story about this ancestor and then I go look at it and it’s one that you’ve written, which always kind of cracks me up because I already have that. So, but we just have to realize that those authored sources, that they could be great clues and they could have absolutely accurate information, but they could also have inaccurate information that’s just been copied. So again, we have to do a good analysis and we can do our own author sources when we figure things out and upload to the online trees, some information that we’ve actually sourced and documented.

Nicole (15m 2s):
I’m just reading my description of Melissa Welch’s name. And I had written a reason why her name was Melissa and not Elizabeth on the FamilySearch tree, because every time you change something in the tree it asks you for a reason, and so I really flushed out this reason statement. That’s my proof. But you know, the thing I left off is Dock’s death certificate that does say her name is Elizabeth. And there was one other daughter Melissa’s daughter, Debbie, and on her death certificate, it says, her mother’s name is Lizzy.

Diana (15m 35s):
So what do we do with those death certificates? Well, let’s talk a little bit about Dock’s death certificate. We’ve referenced that several times, and that was our starting point. You know, he was our direct ancestor. Obviously on a death certificate, the person who died doesn’t generally give the name of their parents, right? They’re usually not the informant for their own death, but in his case, he was in the Eastern state hospital at Vinita, Oklahoma when he died. And he was in this institution the last 17 years of his life. So the informant was hospital records and I’m thinking he gave that information when he was admitted to the hospital and as far as his understanding, his mother’s name was Elizabeth Welch.

Diana (16m 21s):
So this is a little bit different case that the informant was actually the deceased, as far as I can tell, and as much as I know about his situation. And the other interesting thing is he was the informant for his younger sister, Debbie Adove’s death certificate, where he lists the mother as Lizzie Welch. So in his mind, his mother was named Elizabeth Welch. He called her Elizabeth and Lizzie, but those are the only two instances that we have that name. So the youngest child somewhere, he got that name.

Nicole (16m 54s):
It’s so interesting. It’s really wonder where he got that. Maybe that was her middle name and she never went by it, or we just don’t know.

Diana (17m 1s):
Well, an interesting thing that I found is one of her older daughters named a daughter, Melissa Elizabeth. So I am wondering if that was her full name and that’s kind of what I have called her by now, because I feel like there’s gotta be some reason why we have that name anyway, when we are verifying our records, it’s important to take apart these sources and think about who the informant was. And so firsthand knowledge from that death certificate of course, is the date of death, which was given by the doctor and who signed the death certificate. And so, you know, we can be pretty sure that that date of death is really accurate, but then that secondary information, the birth date of Dock Harris and the name of his mother, even if it was from Dock, he only knew the birth date and his mother from what people told him, because she died right after his birth.

Diana (17m 59s):
And of course he wouldn’t remember the day he was born, so that secondary information and it’s good information, but we always want to make sure we have more than one source and, and really analyze that. And then we have that undetermined information, which is from the census, because generally we don’t know who gave the information on the census and in both censuses for Elizabeth Malissa, her name is Melissa. So if the head of household John C. Harris was supposed to give the information, he called her Melissa.

Nicole (18m 30s):
That was a really tricky thing to figure out as a beginning genealogist, you know, now we have the tools to analyze that information and really figure out who was the informant and what kind of knowledge did they have that was secondhand or firsthand. And now that’s just such an important tool to use with every document we look at and analyze that information to the person who gave that information, know what they are talking about or not. So I think that’s a really important thing to teach beginners.

Diana (19m 2s):
I agree, because it really can make a big difference. One of the things that I talk about in our book is that birth certificate, it’s on a different line of Christine Schults and she is kind of a same situation as Dock. She was born and then her mother died in childbirth. That all happened January 11th, 1925. Well, the doctor didn’t get around to doing a birth certificate for Christine till August, eight months later and he stated her birth as being February 11th. And obviously she couldn’t be born a month after her mother had died, so that was incorrect information.

Diana (19m 42s):
But you would think the doctor who was present at the birth would have the date correct. And so, you know, I had to do some digging and see that, oh, he didn’t fill this birth certificate out and he just forgot the actual month. So we have so much detective work to look at our records, especially when things don’t add up. That’s what we have to make sure we’re correlating. Well, let’s talk about evidence now that we’ve talked about sources and information and evidence is what we pull from the source information to answer our research question. So what direct evidence do we have? Well, that family Bible gave us direct evidence. It specifically answer the question of when Melissa was born and it has on the marriages page, a specific date for when she was married, July 22nd, 1865, the family Bible doesn’t give any places.

Diana (20m 37s):
So, you know, we talked in the last episode, how excited we were when a FamilySearch hint gave us the actual record. And we found out it was in a completely different county, Burlington county, Texas. We’ve got that direct evidence, which is great. That answers our question. But again, it could be incorrect depending on, on the informant and the situation. Then we have indirect evidence when we have to combine it with something else. And we see a lot of indirect evidence when we’re working with census records, especially before 1880, when we don’t have any relationships listed and we see this couple and then all these children and we can deduce it.

Diana (21m 20s):
They’re probably the parents and these are the children, but we always have to stop them think, well, is that the mother of the children or is this the second wife or third wife, or is it an older daughter? In the research project I just barely did there was an older daughter who was going by a different name listed right after the man. And at first I thought that she was a second wife, and then I realized, no, she is not a second wife. So we have to be so careful in the censuses because they really give us a lot of different pieces of information and we have good evidence coming from them. But if it’s not specifically stated as a relationship, it’s just indirect.

Diana (22m 2s):
Yeah.

Nicole (22m 3s):
That’s another mistake that I made was assuming that because they’re listed together on the census, their parent-child, and usually they are, we can infer that, but we never know for sure on those pre-1880 census numeration.

Diana (22m 18s):
Yeah. And it’s always good to just have that in the back of our mind that we need to verify with other records. You know, if we can go find him in 1880 or later, since this is where they actually list relationships or find other records that will bring it all together, then we can really use those earlier censuses better. We also have gotten negative evidence and this is when there’s an absence of a situation. So my ancestor Dock Harris never appears in the census with his mother, of course, because she died right after his birth in 1886. And he doesn’t appear in a census till 1900 because that 1890 census was destroyed mainly and doesn’t exist for his specific location.

Diana (23m 5s):
And in that household, we’ve got a Rebecca. Looking at that, if I didn’t know the family situation, I would maybe think that that was his mother, because she’s, we’ve got John Harris, who’s the head of household, listing his wife, and then there’s a step son and then a daughter, daughter, son. Well, those relationships, I’ll go back to the head of house, and because there’s Rebecca and then there’s a step son, we can make some connections there and realize that the first wife had died and this is a second wife. And so even though it doesn’t tell us, that we can use some negative evidence there, now John Harris has remarried

Nicole (23m 51s):
When we correlate all of the census records and look at all the clues, we notice these types of things. That’s why it’s so important to compare and contrast records from different times of the person’s life and figure out what’s going on.

Diana (24m 5s):
Yeah. I think it’s really important that with census records, we get every single one for every year of their life. And you may think, well, I know my grandmother, I know my great-grandmother, but those census records give you a little clue into the household, and sometimes there’s extended family living there, and that gives you clues to whole other branch of the family, or you can just learn all sorts of things. So it’s really good practice to make sure you have every census of a person’s life and to correlate all the information that can be found between those different censuses. So some tips as you are analyzing your evidence, you can do different things like, I like the term “evidence linkage bundles”

Diana (24m 53s):
from Robert Anderson’s book.

Nicole (24m 54s):
Yeah. That’s from the book Elements of Genealogical Analysis by Robert Charles Anderson.

Diana (24m 59s):
Yeah. I like how we talked about linkage bundles in that book. And he was doing research in Colonial America in New England and really showed how you can take all these different pieces of evidence and put them together, to separate people of the same name, or to make a real case for a person’s identity. So I like that. And sometimes when I’m working on cases, I will, in my research log, do some kind of color coding. And then as their identities separate out and it becomes clear who is who then I can put them together to separate pages of a spreadsheet or you can use a table trying to put together these pieces of information and evidence for individuals.

Nicole (25m 50s):
Yeah. I liked how he talked about when the linkage bundles, there has to be a reason that you’re making that linkage. You can’t just take two separate things and say, name is the same. There has to be something that helps you make that linkage beyond just the name.

Diana (26m 5s):
Exactly, locality or maybe the FAN club, the time and place. Well, and the research process after we have analyzed what we actually have, then we have to do some locality research and we can pay attention to the locations in the timeline. The whole point of learning about the locality is to do new research, to see if there are more records that can shed some light on what we’ve found. You know, you might have an ancestor on the FamilySearch family tree, and there’s only three or four sources. And when you look at them, you realize that they’re really scarce. They’re only a maybe mentions of that person in their children’s death certificates that are not even sources for that person’s life.

Diana (26m 48s):
And so you’re going to have to do some research and flush out their life story. So you’ll have to decide on the location to research. And this is where you can do that locality guide and learn about the history and geography, get some maps in there. Some links to websites learn about jurisdictions. Sometimes we only do our record on the county level and we forget that there could be records on the state level or the country level or the town level and so important to make sure we’re hitting each of those levels. I know I have found some great records in unusual places like the Georgia state legislature. I found a petition for a divorce for my ancestors in 1804.

Diana (27m 31s):
So I mean, that was a crazy record. I had no idea that would be on a state level. So keep an open mind for that.

Nicole (27m 39s):
Yeah, it’s important. I think with these cases where there are multiple people with the same name that we look for those records that could really help us differentiate them and we need to do reasonably exhaustive research so that we can really figure it out. And that does include finding those more unique record types that might be in a place we haven’t been looking or just a repository we’re not familiar with.

Diana (28m 2s):
Right. And we also to keep in mind those boundary changes because the county that they are living in in 1880, when we are looking at them could have not existed in 1840 when we should be researching. And so we’d need to look at a parent county or the county next door, when a little piece of that was sliced off and put into the county. Sometimes we can figure out where our ancestors were living within a county. If we have a land record, that’s really specific, but sometimes we really have no idea where exactly they were. And we need to keep in mind that records could be all around that area or even in a whole different county, like with that marriage record.

Diana (28m 43s):
So to do your locality research, I just recommend always to start with the FamilySearch Wiki, because that’ll point you to several other places and then to use the catalog, to see what’s available online at FamilySearch or at the Family History library. And then to expand out sometimes the easiest way is just to do a Google search for your locality and see if you can pull up some county, historical societies or libraries. There’s so many different ways to find information on your locality and doing that guide gives you a place to put it all together. And then from that, you can make your research plan.

Diana (29m 24s):
You know, you’ve discovered some new places to search and some new records, and then you can make a plan.

Nicole (29m 31s):
Yes, the research planning is such an important part.

Diana (29m 35s):
So when we look at a plan for our case study, what do we know? First thing we want to do is make that summary of known facts. And I like to put this in a table and it helps me just to get clear in my head, but we really actually know, we knew that Melissa was born 1844 in South Carolina. She got married in July of 1865 in Texas, in Burleson county. And that she lived in Milam county, Texas in 1870 and 1880, and that she died there. So that’s not really a lot to go on. And this is so common for our women that we don’t have them mentioned in many records. We’re even lucky to have that birth date from the Bible records.

Diana (30m 16s):
Often we don’t have a specific birth date. We only have an estimation from a census, but we can still create a good hypothesis about what might’ve happened.

Nicole (30m 25s):
What’s interesting is that the objective that we made at the beginning had a specific place of birth because we had assumed, you know, that Meredith was her father and that she was born in Sumpter county, but reviewing the timeline, and then making our summary of known facts, we realized we actually didn’t have a specific place of birth. We had just had South Carolina.

Diana (30m 46s):
Right, and sometimes our objectives will have incorrect information because we have to start somewhere. We have to put down what we know at the time. All right. So our hypothesis is obviously she moved to Texas. If she was born in South Carolina, somehow she had to get to Texas by 1865 when she married. And we usually young women don’t move out on their own. They usually move because there was a family migration. And we know from our previous research that Southern migration typically was in stages, you know, South Carolina. And then they maybe went to Georgia or Arkansas or Alabama or Mississippi, and then they would get into Texas.

Diana (31m 28s):
So, I mean, I’m sure there are cases where somebody said, okay, in South Carolina, I’m going all the way to Texas, but generally they stopped along the path. And so opening up your mind to that possibility that they might be somewhere in between can be helpful. And then our other hypothesis, generally they moved as a group, so could there be some other Welch family members near Melissa in Texas, even, you know, if they all moved as a family, shouldn’t there be some other Welch’s in Texas.

Nicole (31m 60s):
Absolutely. And that was one of the things that tipped me off, because I was looking for other relatives that were around her in Texas and there weren’t any. A Meredith or Susanna, they stayed in Sumpter.

Diana (32m 10s):
And so it wouldn’t be likely that this young woman would just go out on her own and end up in Texas. Really good clue. Once you kind of got your hypothesis, that’s guiding you, you can identify some sources and a strategy. Obviously we needed more information on this. So for saying that she was born in South Carolina and she moved to Texas by 1865 and that she had followed this migration pattern, you know, maybe we could look more at census records. Maybe we could look for some more marriage records. Could we look for some FAN clubs, some more Welch’s? When you’re working on your research plan, you really want to think about a couple of things: one is to look for original records, If you only have an index record, and I see this so much that the index has very limited information, and when you get that original record, it can open up your research so you always want to look for original;

Diana (33m 9s):
you want to work on the FAN club, those friends, associates, and neighbors; and then you also want to think what’s missing? Is there a census that you don’t have for the family? Is there a possibility of a birth or a death record or cemetery record? Think about what else you could be looking for. So we did create a strategy based on this and found some really good things that really opened up the research. Here’s a possible research plan: find the original marriage record, which, you know, when we were doing this research, we didn’t have; look again at that 1850 census, we had assumed that the Elizabeth Welch in Sumpter county was ours, but maybe we need to open our mind up and maybe she was going by Melissa and could be in a different Southern state in South Carolina;

Diana (34m 4s):
and then look in the 1860 census, which was missing, for Elizabeth or Melissa; search the 1870 census of Milam county, Texas for other Welch families, that’s where we know our gal was living, were there other Welch families around that could be her relatives; and then look for marriage records in Texas, because if the family had moved out, it makes sense that any siblings of Melissa could also have gotten married somewhere in Texas. So that’s a possible research plan. And as you’re doing your research planning, of course, you can put those in different order. You can have different records that you want to search for things that will make the most sense and that will give you the most bang for your buck.

Diana (34m 45s):
You know, we’re not going to start with land records right away, because there’s just so many other things we can do first, right?

Nicole (34m 52s):
Yeah. And land records may not be as applicable to finding out parents of a woman in this case, because we have no reason to believe that she ever owned land her own self.

Diana (35m 2s):
Right.

Nicole (35m 3s):
Yet we need to do a little more research.

Diana (35m 5s):
So there’s a logical way to go about this. And I think the more experience you get, the more you kind of realize a good order. You don’t have to really worry so much about making a really good strategy for your research plan. Just get four or five things down that you want to search. So once you’ve got your plan, then it’s time to do the research side and to do your source citations as you’re looking at those sources. So when we looked at that original marriage record, which did come up as a hint and we’ve talked about before, it didn’t have anything on the parents. In Texas, all I did was just really simple you get the date of the marriage license and who it was performed by and the return when they brought it back in.

Diana (35m 47s):
So it’s great to have the record, but it didn’t give any clues about the actual parents of, of Melissa.

Nicole (35m 54s):
And one interesting thing to note on this marriage record that popped up as a hint on FamilySearch is we didn’t download the original image of that marriage record. We just attached it to her in FamilySearch. And then afterward, apparently the contract changed between FamilySearch and the county. And now you have to go into a FamilySearch library or center in order to view the original image, which was disappointing because we didn’t take the time to download it. So we learned a very valuable lesson that we always should download the images of our ancestors’ records to save on our own computer.

Diana (36m 31s):
Right. And you may think that it will always be there on FamilySearch, but they are working under contracts with all of these repositories. So it’s another good reason to keep your own family tree on your computer, as well as your own document images. Well, if we are going back and redoing some census research, you know, in the 1850 census, then we could look at some other people. What did you find out about that 1850 census, Nicole?

Nicole (37m 2s):
Well, the original one that I had found with Meredith and Susanna being the parents of Elizabeth, I also found there as another census in 1850 with a possible parent for Elizabeth Melissa Welch, and it was for a girl named Melissa and not Elizabeth, and it was also in South Carolina and the parents names were different, obviously it’s different household. And it was just another candidate for our Melissa. And this one looked to be a little more probable to me since in all the other records, she went by Melissa, records of her during her life, not of her children’s death certificates. So in her marriage in 1865, she was going by Melissa, in 1870, she was going by Melissa in 1880 she was Melissa, so it makes sense that in 1850 she would be Melissa as well.

Nicole (37m 50s):
So in 1850, it was George Welch, an inferred wife named Lucinda and their inferred children, including a Melissa Welch who was born in 1844 in South Carolina. And this family was living in Pickens county in Alabama. So on the migration path, probably toward Texas, in between South Carolina and Texas, and a lot of Southern families migrated that direction, ending up in Texas and Oklahoma.

Diana (38m 20s):
Right. And the really great thing about looking at the census records is taking note of the birth place of all the family members, because Melissa was the last one born in South Carolina. So we know from the census, or we can surmise that in 1844, when she was born, they were still in South Carolina, but then the next child, George Welch, age three, was born in Alabama. So sometime between 1844 and 1847, the family moved. So that’s always really fun when you see a specific migration path, just from the birth place of the children. And of course you have to correlate that with other records, but sometimes that’s just spot on.

Diana (39m 3s):
So the other great thing about this census was it gives us a lot of family members. We have all these different siblings, there’s five older siblings for Melissa and two younger siblings. So if we can find any of those people out in Texas near her, that would be some really good evidence that this is her birth family. Right? Absolutely. So the next thing on the research plan was the 1860 census. And, you know, sometimes there’s just the census that the family’s missing on. I have run into this a lot in the south. And I think one of the reasons could be that they were migrating, perhaps that was when they were on the move from Alabama to Texas.

Diana (39m 47s):
And it just got missed in the census. Yeah, we don’t know. But every once in a while it does happen that household is missed, even though the censuses are usually pretty good with being inclusive of everyone. And then the 1870 census looking for some of those same name individuals, there was a census that had two people that were the same, a Susan and George Welch and they were right there in Milam county, Texas, same places as Melissa. But what did you notice about the census?

Nicole (40m 21s):
It was a little bit tricky because the mother’s name was not Lucinda, like I thought it should be, it was Cynthia. So it took me some time to decide this was our family, but ultimately living in the same place, Milam county and two siblings of Melissa, George and Susan, matching up kind of gave me the clue that it was the right family. And if I remember right, they were really living close to Melissa and her married family.

Diana (40m 49s):
Yeah. Those names, again, those names just kept tripping us up in the situation. But when we got to the fifth part of the research plan, looking at marriages, right around the area of Milam and Burleson, where we have Melissa, you know, her marriage in Burleson, her censuses in Milam, there is also Robertson county it’s really, really close. And there were several Welch marriages for those people that were in that 1850 census. There was William and James and Mariah, and they were all married 1855, 1857 in this Robertson county.

Diana (41m 29s):
So it seemed like this whole family had come out to Robertson. And for whatever reason, somebody went down to Burleson and that’s where Melissa was married. But having all these marriages kind of clustered adds another piece of evidence that this is her family,

Nicole (41m 46s):
One of the biggest clues as I was doing this research, finding the family all living in Texas and getting married there.

Diana (41m 54s):
Yeah, that’s really key. And it comes back to that FAN club. If you’re stuck on your ancestor, go research associates and neighbors and see if you can find a group coming together to a new place. Well, to kind of finish up the story in revisiting this and doing a research, of course, we would keep good notes in our research log and keep source citations, and then finally write up a conclusion. And so some of the things when you’re writing up your conclusions that you need to do is to correlate all of the evidence. So one of the interesting things was figuring out the real name of Melissa’s mother, she was Cynthia in one census and she was Lucinda in another census, and neither one of those were actually her real name, which was Lucindrilla.

Diana (42m 46s):
So tell us a little bit about that story. Cause that’s fun.

Nicole (42m 50s):
Searching for more about Lucinda and George Welch after finding they were the parents of Melissa and just trying to extend the data backwards into South Carolina. And I found that Lucinda’s maiden name was Keaton based on one of her children’s death certificates. And so I searched for Keatons in South Carolina. And I had a clue that they came from Pendleton because one of their daughters got married in Pendleton. So looking at Pendleton district for Keatons, I found there was one man who was the right age to be Lucinda’s father. And I found his estate record and it listed all of his 13 children and one of the daughters was Lucindrilla, wife of George Welch.

Nicole (42m 46s):
So that was just an amazing record.

Nicole (43m 37s):
The only record I’ve ever found that lists, her name as Lucindrilla.

Diana (43m 44s):
Yeah. That was really fun to find that. And the interesting thing was that Melissa named a daughter, Margaret Cinderella, and we had always looked at that name Cinderella and thought that was really interesting. So now I’m wondering if it was really maybe Lucindrilla that she named her daughter and somehow they got written down or translated as Cinderella.

Nicole (44m 3s):
So Lucinda actually went by Cindrilla in 1880. And I don’t know if they just wrote it as Cindrilla or Cinderella was, but she went by, but it might’ve been, you know, Cindrilla, but then they thought of it as Cinderella as the Cinderella story became popular, who knows. But I think when she was younger, her name was Lucindrilla. And when you add Ella to the end of a name, it kind of means like little girl. So I’m not even sure maybe her name really was Lucinda and she kind of went by Lucindrilla as a little girl, who knows, if that really was her full name. But then as she was older, she became Lucinda one time on the census, they wrote a name as Cynthia, which could have just been an error.

Nicole (44m 44s):
And then in 1880 she was listed as Cindrilla.

Diana (44m 47s):
Oh my goodness. No wonder it was so tricky figuring this out between Elizabeth, Melissa and then Cynthia, Lucinda, Cindrilla, I mean the women had these crazy names now they married men that were very solid: George and John.

Nicole (45m 4s):
You know, I actually appreciated a more unique name, I guess because George and John have their own unique challenges, especially John Harris.

Diana (45m 14s):
So you’re right, it was good having some different names and with the siblings too, because one of them was Mariah, which is, you know, not super unusual, but a little bit different south. And it was nice having a lot of siblings to trace. One of them could be coincidence, but having three? Anyway, that was awesome that you were able to correct the parents and then even better is the fact that DNA cousin matches are kind of coming through with the Keaton family. So it’s fun when you see the DNA backing up what you’ve worked so hard to do with the documents.

Nicole (45m 48s):
It is, it’s really fun to see that. And I think if I had done this research project, now, it would have been a lot easier because there’s several good DNA matches leading to the right parents.

Diana (45m 59s):
Right. But you know, that’s just the way it goes, we did the best we could at the time. So our final thing really, you need to write up a conclusion because obviously this is not easy to make the connection between Melissa Harris and Melissa Welch in Alabama. There has to be something written that you can share with other people. A research report with source citations is ideal because then anyone can follow your path and look at all of the sources. And it gives you a chance to explain everything really well. And you can upload this to FamilySearch. You can upload it to Ancestry, but if nothing else, you can use the notes feature on Ancestry or your own database to write a summary and you can write a life sketch on FamilySearch, just really important to write something, to explain your research and resolve the conflicts and to be able to share with people.

Diana (46m 51s):
I love having research reports to share with my DNA cousins. And sometimes that really helps to make a connection. When I say I’ve got or something I can share with you and, and they’ll respond to me, writing is a great thing to do.

Nicole (47m 4s):
Yes, it is. It’s wonderful to write up something and then to feel the confidence that you have completed the genealogical proof standard and applied it to your research. And you have a conclusion that will stand up to scrutiny,

Diana (47m 20s):
Right. And so if you have a similar situation where you have somebody incorrect in your family tree and you discover it, then it’s time to fix it. And luckily we can fix it. We can go in and correct our own database first and then go fix our online tree. We can go work on the collaborative family trees. We might have to unmerge identities or create a second identity for people of the same name. Now there’s ways to fix all of it. And of course, as we do that, we want to add the sources and make sure that everyone else will understand why we’re making these changes. And finally, we might want to email cousins that have incorrect information.

Diana (48m 2s):
If they’ve copied our incorrect information, we can offer our report and you know, maybe linked to the FamilySearch family tree or WikiTree. If you’ve corrected information there, you know, whatever we can do to fix things and start getting things corrected. It’s a good thing to do.

Nicole (48m 18s):
Yes. It is exciting to be able to fix that up and let others know what you found.

Diana (48m 24s):
All right. Well, thanks for listening to us. Talk all about this case and I hope it’s given everyone some ideas of how to tackle your own family tree. And if you have something incorrect in it don’t feel bad. Cause we did too. We can all fix our family trees and make our collaborative trees even better.

Nicole (48m 43s):
All right, everyone have a great week.

Diana (48m 49s):
Bye-bye

Nicole (48m 49s):
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