Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about evaluating family trees and the sources in them to help us determine if a family tree is accurate. We review independent sources, primary information, and direct evidence. In the absence of direct evidence, we can often put together a body of indirect evidence to help us prove a parent-child link, but that requires a written conclusion. Often family trees are missing this element.
Transcript
Nicole Elder Dyer (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 253, how to evaluate Sources in Family Trees. 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 genealogist professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team@familylocket.com and the authors of research like a pro, a genealogist guide with Robin Worland. They also co-authored the Companion Volume Research like a Pro with dna. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.
Nicole Elder Dyer (42s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, break down genealogy brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone. Welcome to research like a Pro today.
2 (54s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing?
Nicole Elder Dyer (57s):
I’m just really having a good time talking with you about our genealogy research. It’s so fun that we get to do this together.
2 (1m 4s):
I agree. I remember back before we started the podcast and we’d been talking on the phone for an hour about our research and you said we should have been recording this. This would be a great podcast. And that is how the research like Pro Genealogy podcast was born. I said, I can talk if you can figure out the technology. So you did, and here we are, 253 episodes later. It’s been a such a fun journey.
Nicole Elder Dyer (1m 27s):
Thanks everyone for listening. That really makes it possible to have listeners, so thanks.
2 (1m 32s):
We love it.
Nicole Elder Dyer (1m 33s):
Well, our announcements for today are that we have our Airtable quick reference guide available that teaches you how to use it for genealogy research logs and our webinar series. This month we have a research like a pro study group member presenting her research that she found in last year’s study group project. So she’s sharing how she found the parents of one of her ancestors who lived in Wisconsin. If you’d like to join us in the fall for our study group research like a pro that begins in August, and we’d love to have you join us as a peer group leader. If you have experience with the research like a pro process, please apply on our website and we will give you complimentary registration. If you’re accepted, then join our newsletter that comes out every Monday.
Nicole Elder Dyer (2m 16s):
It has new podcast episodes and blog posts and YouTube videos that we’ve done, information about our upcoming lectures at conferences and any sales or discounts or news that we have. So that’s our weekly Family lock IT newsletter. And then as far as upcoming conferences, we’re almost to the National Genealogical Society Conference at the end of this month. Really looking forward to learning from one of the premier conferences in the country.
2 (2m 44s):
We are excited about that. It’s always fun to go to these big conferences or participate online if that’s your option. Well, we have a listener spotlight. Our listener is Dragon Wings 1 21, and they say thank you for going through the very basics recently on how to do genealogy along with the different companies. I’ve run through my tree several times knowing it can’t be correct. Ancestor keeps giving me hints for seemingly old families who fought in the Revolutionary War and came across on the Mayflower. I’m adopted and don’t know much about my genealogy, so I doubt the results I keep arriving at. I now see the difficulty in accomplishing a good tree, family tree on family searches, added more ancestors to my tree and a lot seemed to be royalty going back a long way.
2 (3m 29s):
How accurate can these be in your tree? I took a DNA test and was wondering if that would help with the more accurate tree, especially going far back. Again, thank you so much and I appreciate your podcast. I’ve gone from being freaked out about seeing Mayflower ancestors to presidents and now royalty and you have helped a lot in explaining the whole big picture, so we’re glad that we can help. It can be really confusing if you’re new to genealogy and you keep seeing these hints or you keep seeing those things in family search that look like they are established lineages, then you get an email saying you’re related to a Mayflower ancestor. But then you look at it and you think, does anybody really have this research done?
2 (4m 9s):
How did they really know? So we’re gonna talk all about that today.
Nicole Elder Dyer (4m 13s):
Yeah, so today we’ll talk about evaluating sources in family trees. And this is such an important skill to have because we use family trees all the time. Of course, we want to see what other people have published about our lines and see if there could be any accuracy in that. And I’m glad that our listener has asked this question because we do need to be thinking about this and making sure that we’re not adding incorrect lines to our family tree. And it reminds me of when we first started building our family tree, how fun and exciting it was to find a published family tree that extended our line 10 generations to the past. And some of those did go back to royalty and back to Mayflower revolutionary ancestors and we would just, you know, take that and copy it right into our tree.
Nicole Elder Dyer (4m 59s):
You know, it was like, that’s just, oh, yay. But now looking back, of course we’ve recognized the importance of evaluating things before we just willy-nilly add them to our tree. If this has happened to you and you find yourself looking at your tree and wondering, how do I know if these things I’ve added are even correct, then that’s what we’ll talk about today. So we’ll start with ancestry because ancestry has a lot of public member trees that members of ancestry have added and there are all different levels of ancestry members. There’s those who are beginners, intermediate, advanced, and everywhere in between. And so we need to analyze the tree to see if it was created by somebody who was using the sources and information and evidence that was available, or if they were just attaching hints that maybe were for incorrect people.
Nicole Elder Dyer (5m 49s):
There’s all kinds of chances that mistakes were made. So we need to check that. So let’s talk about how Ancestry does their hinting, because the hinting is often what throws us off when we’re first getting started in genealogy. There is a support article at Ancestry about how their hints work. So we’ll put the link to that in the show notes so that you can kind of review that. But it basically says there are two kinds of hints, record hints and potential parent hints. And in the record hints the databases that they include for that are some of their most common record types, census birth, marriage, death, and public family trees. So those are usually the types of hints that you’ll receive.
Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 31s):
The hinting algorithm at Ancestry takes the information that you have in your tree currently and then looks for matching information in records and then gives you hints and it looks mostly at vital information. So birth date and birthplace, death date and death place, and relationships to family members and name. And so if you change any of that information significantly, then you can change the hints that you’re given. Like if you change a person’s name or if you change their birthdate by more than a year or two. When you evaluate a hint that you’re given of a new record, you can compare that information to what your tree says and then you can either accept the hint, reject the hint, or you can say maybe for a hint that you are not sure about.
Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 23s):
Sometimes I just don’t do anything if I’m not ready to accept, reject or maybe, but I like that there’s the maybe option for those times when you’re not sure. And most of the time for people that are more distant in our family tree, the answer really should be maybe more often than it is. And I think a lot of people add hints before really evaluating the record and considering that there could be more people with that name alive at that time period. There’s a lot of things you can do to see if a hint matches your person, and one of the things that you need to consider is where the person lived and how likely is it that they moved all around to different states when it was early 17 hundreds or something.
Nicole Elder Dyer (8m 3s):
It is possible that people moved, but it’s more likely that they lived in or near the same place where they grew up or where they settled as an adult. And if you’re finding hints for different locations, you need to have a reason to justify attaching that hint for a new location before you add it because it it’s highly likely impossible that there was another person with that name who generated a record in a different location, even if the name seems unique to us. Now, it could have been common back then, and my example for that is Amaa Arnold, I thought surely there was only one man named Amaa Arnold living in 1790 and 1800. But when I looked in the census records, I found two, one lived in Massachusetts and one lived in New York.
Nicole Elder Dyer (8m 46s):
So we need to just be aware that there were people with the same names running around.
2 (8m 53s):
That’s a great example for Ama Arnold because that does seem like an unusual name. And then you get into even more problems if you have somebody with a name like Benjamin Cox who there’s a lot in the same area. So we do have to do some good work. One of the things we can do is do a complete project. And that is what a lot of people use the research, like a pro process for when they have something like that, some anomaly or something that doesn’t quite add up, or if they just wanna prove, you know, a generation or one of those things like Mayflower or Revolutionary War Service. When you’re doing a project like trying to connect to a Mayflower ancestor, you have to connect every single generation.
2 (9m 34s):
So you may get back to say your second great grandparents and everything looks good, you’ve got documents censuses, but then all of a sudden second to third generation, they were a migrating ancestor. They came from Virginia out to Texas, and how do you really know that that jump back to Virginia is correct. And that’s when you do a complete project, then you do the research planning, you do all the steps and you keep a research log with your citations, you write something up and that’s how you begin to prove those intermediate generations where you’re not sure if you have the right person or if the hint is even correct. So that’s what’s so wonderful about having a research process because it is how you tackle these tough challenges.
Nicole Elder Dyer (10m 18s):
Exactly. Well, our listener mentioned that she saw in the family search family tree that her tree went back to royalty. And that was kind of surprising to her and made her question, could this be right? Well, it could be right. Some royalty lines are well documented. But of course like anything, some lines from royalty need more work to be proven. There is a chance that you do have some royalty in your family tree, especially if it’s early medieval times royalty. And we have the little experience with this. We have a line that my aunt documented back to Charlamagne, and she didn’t do it all herself. She hooked in one of our lines back to a known descent line from Charlamagne.
Nicole Elder Dyer (11m 2s):
So if you’re not aware of who that is, I actually did a project about him for my cultural history project in, I don’t know, what was that seventh grade? It was eighth
2 (11m 11s):
Grade. Yeah,
Nicole Elder Dyer (11m 12s):
It was eighth grade. And so I had to make a big science fair type board all about Charlemagne. But he was born in the 700 s and he was the first leader after the fall of the Roman Empire. He had a lot of children, a lot of genealogists have traced Charlemagne’s descent, and many people can claim that they’re a descendant of Charlemagne. And if you think about it, when family trees go back to the Middle Ages, there weren’t as many people living then as there are now. And so our family trees all kind of collapse as we go back that far back in time to the same small number of people who had descendants who survived.
Nicole Elder Dyer (11m 52s):
So we probably all are related to some of those people and probably the lines of dissent from the commoners and the peasants are not preserved. So that’s why you may sometimes see that a line of dissent back to royalty is preserved because that’s where historians placed emphasis on keeping records and they kept track of who the king’s descendants were because that was important to them. So we actually have some information about who these people were.
2 (12m 23s):
We have another line that goes back to King James in England in like the 16 hundreds. So I always thought that was fun too,
Nicole Elder Dyer (12m 30s):
Right? And of course I haven’t spent any time to evaluate all of those linkages, you know? But there are some sources that can help us with this by authors who are established genealogists. And one of them I found on the genealogical.com website, they’re a publisher and they had an article about Charlemagne and a, a series of volumes that was written about the pedigrees of some of emperor Charlemagne’s descendants. And these were published originally in 19 41, 19 74, and 1978. So you can purchase these from Genealogical Publishing Company if you’re interested in kind of reviewing some of these pedigrees.
Nicole Elder Dyer (13m 12s):
And the books lay out 216 different lines of dissent from the emperor to tens of thousands of people. So if you can prove your dissent from Emperor Charlemagne, that means you’ve established a line of dissent that spans over a thousand years. So it’s kind of amazing.
2 (13m 31s):
That is amazing. And for things like Mayflower, they have what they call the silver books. So each one of the Mayflower documented ancestors, they have got their lines built out for about five generations. So all you have to do is connect up your line to one of those documented lines to prove that relationship. And often it’s there in the middle that gets a little messy. And then if you’re trying to get into a Leonard society like the Daughters of the American Revolution, they also have some proven pedigrees that you just have to connect to that other people have submitted. And if you can also connect, you can get in. So you don’t have to start from square one on some of these things that you want to prove.
Nicole Elder Dyer (14m 11s):
Right. So I guess the takeaway is there are published authored sources from respectable genealogists who have traced the famous people’s lines of descent, forward a few generations. Then if you can start it yourself and prove your line back several generations, then the two lines can meet in the middle, and then you can feel confident that you have a line back to that famous person, whether they’re royalty or somebody in the Revolutionary War or someone from the Mayflower.
2 (14m 42s):
And we do that with a lot of our client projects. That’s exactly what we do.
Nicole Elder Dyer (14m 47s):
Exactly.
2 (14m 49s):
Okay. So it is up to us to evaluate each one of those parent child links. And as we are doing that, we are doing analysis. So some things that we need to know, we need to talk about, sources, information and evidence, this is what we do. And we’re looking at a record like a birth certificate and sources come in, original meaning that was the original document that was created such as the birth certificate, or it can be derivative, maybe Ancestry just has an indexed version of that birth certificate and just has a couple of items like the parents and the birth date. And they don’t have any other information that could be viewed when you see the original.
2 (15m 31s):
Or it could be authored where someone has written up a biography of an ancestor and put in their birth date. And so it’s really important to know that because that helps us determine if a piece of information is correct or incorrect. So that brings us to information. We have primary information given by someone who witnessed the event firsthand. Like the mother giving birth to the child would be a primary witness. She’d be a primary informant, but that same child, even though they were there at their birth, they were not aware at their birth. So they’re just believing what their mother says about their birth date and who their parents are.
2 (16m 13s):
And so that would be called secondary information. And then we take those pieces of information from the sources to provide evidence. And so if someone were going to write their story or put in their family tree about this birth of this individual, if it was a birth certificate, that would be direct evidence because it answers the question of when was this person born? Now we also have indirect evidence that comes when we are taking a several pieces and putting them together. So you may not have a birth certificate, especially if someone was born pre 1900, almost no one has birth certificates that early, unless you’re living in somewhere other than the United States like England, they have birth registration that early.
2 (16m 58s):
And so if you are taking, say your birth information from a lot of different sources, maybe you’ve got several different censuses and they all get different dates and you are bringing those together to come up with a birth date. That’s just your best guess based on a lot of different factors. And that would be indirect evidence of that birth date. So we just have to really take this into mind because we are going to have conflicts, not everything’s going to agree, and we need to figure out what the best piece of information is from the best source so we get good evidence,
Nicole Elder Dyer (17m 34s):
Right? And so we’re often looking at a family tree and looking at the sources attached to the different people to try to figure out does this relationship in the tree have any source or information or evidence to back it up? Often you’ll find that in those early years of the 18 hundreds, going back further, there won’t be a source that gives information about a parent-child relationship. You’ll maybe see like a census from 1820 that doesn’t list any familial relationships. You might see a tax record and if you’re lucky, you’ll see a will or a probate record attached. But often those are not attached. Sometimes people have looked at a will or a probate record when they made the connection, but they didn’t add it to the tree as evidence.
Nicole Elder Dyer (18m 20s):
And so sometimes you’ll see relationships and wonder, I wonder how this person came to this conclusion. And sometimes you have to reach out to them and say, how did you know this was the parent? And a lot of the time the answer is, I saw it in someone else’s tree. But sometimes you’ll get a person who actually did the research themselves and they’ll say, I looked at a will. And sometimes they are looking at an authored source that’s been published about their family, like a big family history book that has all the descendants of, you know, William Dyer who lived in Virginia and all of his southern family. And so when we find out what the source was, then we can evaluate it and find out if it was original or derivative or authored, and if the information is primary or secondary.
Nicole Elder Dyer (19m 3s):
And if the evidence is direct or indirect.
2 (19m 6s):
I have a fun example of looking at an ancestry tree and there’s a death certificate on there that someone has uploaded themselves and it’s all typed out, but then somebody is handwritten in the name of the father and they’ve given their interpretation of what the cause of death was. I’ve never seen this before, but it’s so interesting because obviously somebody just added that information to a death certificate. Isn’t that so funny? So something like that, you’d look at that and you think, okay, that death certificate, that’s good information, but who’s writing this in and how did they know? So we have to look at this with our analyzing brain to see what could be some red flags or maybe clues that are just fabulous.
Nicole Elder Dyer (19m 49s):
That’s interesting that the death certificate was annotated.
2 (19m 52s):
Ah-huh. And then uploaded,
Nicole Elder Dyer (19m 56s):
Well, when you’re looking at a family tree and you want to verify a relationship between a child and your tree, going back to a parent, here are some things to do. You should look at the sources that are attached. And if there’s like a list of 10 sources, look at each one, look to see if it’s a derivative or an original. A derivative is just an indexed or transcribed version of the record, and there’s no link to an image of it. If there’s a a link to an image of a record that looks like it was created at the time of the event, then that’s probably more likely to be an original. If it’s an original record, then you can see all the details and you can figure out sometimes who the informant was, if it’s primary or secondary information and so forth.
Nicole Elder Dyer (20m 39s):
So once you’ve looked at those sources to figure out which ones were originals, then you can see, okay, I need to get some of these originals. The purpose of an index is to point you to the original. So if you’re looking and half of those records are just indexed or abstract records only, then you can order the originals or figure out how to get the originals. Then if you’re looking at the originals, you can decide if those original records provide evidence for your question. Do they tell you the name of the parent? Do they hint at the fact that the parent was born in a certain place? You know, the 1880 census will tell us that a person’s parent was born in a certain place.
Nicole Elder Dyer (21m 20s):
So that can be an indirect piece of evidence about the person’s parent. And as you can see, sometimes this gets a little hairy and you can’t just look at all the sources and come to a conclusion. Sometimes you need to take some notes and that’s where the research like a pro process comes in so handy because then you can, you know, build a timeline with the known information, the sources that you have, and that really helps you analyze and see what there is and then see what’s missing and see what you need to do. And that will help you form a research plan. So when you are looking and maybe there are lots of original sources that provide direct evidence of the parent of your person, then we need to also check and see if there are any conflicts.
Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 1s):
So you should hopefully have at least two pieces of evidence that agree on the same parent without any conflicts. And if you do have a conflict or a piece of evidence that says a different parent or something that makes it seem doubtful that it could be right, then you’ll need to check all the different sources and then write a paragraph about your conclusion about why you think these sources are correct. And this other one was incorrect, that was a conflicting piece of evidence, and that’s called a proof summary. And writing a proof summary is not too difficult. It can sometimes just be a bulleted list of items or a paragraph that explains, you know, this record I threw out because it was secondary information given by somebody who wasn’t a witness to the event or something, and these other records were more reliable.
Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 50s):
So when you’ve done that, then you can feel confident about the conclusion that that person’s parent is correct, and you can move back another generation. Sometimes you’ll find that there really is no direct evidence about who the parent is, and there’s no record attached in the tree that says, this person’s parent is so-and-so, like I mentioned. And then you have to probably do a research project where you write down your objective, who was the parent of so-and-so. Then you gather what you know, make a research plan to find more, and then write a report on what you find. And until you’ve really done that, then you probably are not going to feel confident in tracing that line further back past that individual because you have no evidence to suggest the parent that you found in the tree.
Nicole Elder Dyer (23m 34s):
And so often we skip that because we see an authored source like a family tree where someone has added the parent and we think they must be right, or we just don’t recognize that we need to evaluate that. But so often those are incorrect. And in the project I’m doing right now about John Robert Dyer and figuring out his parents, I have just found so many trees with different parents possible for all these different dyers who lived in the south and a lot of conflicts. So I just decided I need to do the research myself to figure out who the parents are because the trees don’t agree and the trees don’t have a lot of sources. So I need to do a project now to find the documentary evidence and figure out who the parents are.
Nicole Elder Dyer (24m 17s):
And if you don’t have direct evidence, you don’t find any direct evidence, but you find a lot of clues, you know people living in the same town, they were associated with the same families, you can put together an a proof argument of indirect evidence that tells people why you believe your conclusion is accurate. And as you gather evidence, you’ll start to feel eventually that you have looked at every possible record that’s a reasonably exhaustive research. You have documented everything you’ve found in a proof argument, a written conclusion, and you’re starting to feel like you have met the genealogical proof standard. And that can be challenging, but it’s so rewarding to feel that you have reached that conclusion that would stand up to the GPS or genealogical proof standard.
Nicole Elder Dyer (25m 1s):
So when you’re writing a proof, some things to think about are that you have two or more independent sources for your conclusions. And independent sources are ones that don’t rely on the same document or person for that information. And mostly primary information that comes from somebody who was a witness to the event or who was there at the time, and not those secondhand people whose memories may not have lasted. And then focusing on original records, we don’t wanna rely on indexes or abstracts. We want to get the original record. And the more you look at indexes and abstracts and originals and compare them, the more you see how many mistakes there are in derivatives.
Nicole Elder Dyer (25m 43s):
So that’s why it’s so important to get the originals. And after you’ve gathered a body of evidence that is like that with primary information and original sources, and you feel that you’ve met the genealogical proof standard, then you can confidently add that person to your tree and be able to move further back in time. And sometimes we get really, you know, stuck and our trees kind of take a long time to grow, and that’s okay because we’re focusing on accuracy.
2 (26m 9s):
Well, if you’re all excited to do something like this, there is a really fun way to do that. And that is Thomas McKenzie’s genealogy. Doover Thomas is one of our genealogy friends and colleagues. And you can go to his website, it’s called genealogy bargains.com, and then do a search on that for genealogy Doover start here. And he gives you 12 reasons about why to do this, which is just what we have talked about. And then he has specific steps and some resources, and basically it’s just helping you start with you and then going back, verifying each generation. But if you’re just barely getting started with genealogy has some really great beginner tips.
2 (26m 50s):
So we recommend that. And then of course, as Nicole has been talking about, and as I have been saying also when you get to those really difficult parent-child links that you need a real project for, use the research like a pro process that will help you to write it up and actually have that proof that you need for your indirect evidence cases. All right, let’s do a word from our sponsor, newspapers.com. Did your ancestor disappear from vital records? Maybe they moved or got married. Newspapers can help you find them and tell their stories, or have you ever had trouble figuring out how people tie into your family tree? Newspapers are filled with birth notices, marriage announcements, and obituaries.
2 (27m 30s):
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Nicole Elder Dyer (28m 12s):
Well, when you were talking about the genealogy do-over by Thomas McKinzie, by the way, I love that idea of just, you know, I’m gonna start over in my tree, go back to the basics and build my tree. Now that I know some more information about how to do better genealogy, I’m going to redo things to make sure I got it right. So I love that idea. Another idea like that, which was from Yvette Hoing, she’s a certified genealogist, her website, Dutch Genealogy has a blog post about the six levels of ancestral profiles, the Level Up challenge where you can go through each of your ancestors and kind of give them a level of what level of research you’ve gotten them to. You know, have you figured out their name only?
Nicole Elder Dyer (28m 53s):
Do you have their birth and death dates, like their vitals? Do you have their occupations and residents, children and spouses? That would be level three all the way up to level six where you have written a full biography of them. So I just think that’s another fun way to analyze your tree and see where you’re at and really see the holes in your resurgence. Oh yeah, I don’t, all I know about this ancestor is their name. I really don’t have anything else. So that’s a level one name only.
2 (29m 22s):
Yeah, I’m so glad you mentioned that. I wrote a blog post about that and also the Airtable template that I created to use those six levels and start tracking my ancestors. So we do have a blog post on family locket. It tells you all about how you could go ahead and create an Airtable base and then list each one of your ancestors. I have mine divided by paternal and maternal. So in my paternal base, I’ll list all my direct line paternal ancestors, and then I say what level I’m at for them. And I actually have added dna so I can put where I’m at with DNA and test takers. And if I’ve done projects, because I found I was doing multiple projects on some of these tough ancestors and forgetting what I had done, we talk about ’em in the podcast, I write about ’em in blog posts.
2 (30m 8s):
So I wanted to track all of that. So in the show notes, we’ll have a link to my Airtable base and the blog posts that explain how to use it. If you’re interested in starting at square one and tracking what you’ve done, it’s a great way to, to see where you are with your ancestors.
Nicole Elder Dyer (30m 27s):
Right? I love that. Well, the listener had asked a question about how can DNA testing help me with making my tree more accurate? And the first thought I had was that DNA testing for ancestry is not a magic bullet to tell you if your tree is right or wrong, but it can really help you to evaluate your tree and to see if your pedigree that you’ve traced with documentary evidence has DNA matches and DNA evidence to back it up and to say, yes, this line is a truly biological line, and you have traced it accurately. So you can do that. It’s just not going to be as easy and obvious as I think sometimes we hope, you know, when we take a DNA test and what we have to do is evaluate the documentary evidence, you know, the records that we have and the DNA matches in tandem, and we have to actually do even more documentary research when we’re adding DNA evidence because we now have to prove or at least document the lines of the DNA matches we’re finding back to the common ancestor as well.
Nicole Elder Dyer (31m 34s):
So now we’re evaluating even more trees. So it’s really good to practice doing this with a closer relative, like a grandparent or a great grandparent. And once you’ve figured out how to do it and analyze the DNA n and documentary evidence together and write about it, then you’re prepared to do it for more distant ancestors. So maybe start with a great-grandparent and write a paragraph about your documentary evidence and then write a paragraph about the DNA matches that you’ve found. And do those DNA matches share the amount of DNA n you would expect for the relationship you’ve figured out based on their tree and your tree? Do they all have shared matches with each other or are they clustered at least to the right side of the family, maternal or paternal?
Nicole Elder Dyer (32m 17s):
Also, have we checked to see if those DNA matches share other common ancestors with you? Like is there pedigree complete enough that we can even do that analysis? So there’s several things that we need to do as we’re incorporating DNA matches into our evidence and as we add them to our body of evidence, it is exciting to be able to say, yes, this person that I’ve traced with documentary evidence now appears to be biological ancestor as well.
2 (32m 40s):
That’s just such a great use of DNA and it is exciting to be able to verify those lines using dna. Well, the final tool we can use is relative finder, and this is a fun website by the BYU Brigham Young University Technology Lab. And it’s how you can find out if you’re related to famous people. And so you just go to relative minder.org and you’ll be prompted to put in your family search login because this uses the family search, family treat, which as we have talked about, it’s only as good as the sources in the family search family treat. So I’ve done this for some fun parties where everybody logs in and sees who is related to who or who is related to a signer of the declaration or royalty.
2 (33m 29s):
So it’s always fun to look at that. Some of those I just really look at with a grain of salt. I think that the link’s probably broken somewhere, but we do have one that we feel is pretty accurate. And that is to our cousin, president Dwight Eisenhower. And I have got a documented Eisenhower line, at least I have documented it back as far as 17 hundreds in in North Carolina. But this is one of those that we connected because it’s been fairly well researched. And as you can imagine, you know, when a president becomes president, they do a big genealogy thing and often the family search library used to be the Family history library.
2 (34m 10s):
Often their v I P team will do research for the presidents and present that to them or other genealogists, you know, will really document those lines. So anyway, our connection to President Eisenhower looks pretty good. It’s fourth cousins four times removed from me, but others are a little bit more shaky and I would really want to look at those. If their seventh cousin 10 times removed, then you kinda wonder,
Nicole Elder Dyer (34m 37s):
Yes, if it’s a seventh cousin, 10 times removed, if it’s a 12th cousin, five times removed, those more distant generations are much more difficult to verify. And so many of those are incorrect, or they could be correct, they’re just not documented properly. So if they were tested with the things we’ve been talking about, we could find that there is an inaccuracy. So that would break the whole link. So if you’re finding that your tree has a lot of famous people or that you’re related to presidents or famous royalty, Mayflower Revolutionary, then yes, I would definitely take that with a grain of salt, just like our listener said. And just recognize that often in the past a lot of genealogists were focused on trying to prove that they were related to someone special or famous or royal.
Nicole Elder Dyer (35m 27s):
And so that’s why sometimes those lines are so focused on, it’s up to us to focus on our lines of people who were just farmers or who weren’t famous and try to figure out who their parents were. And I just feel like as we focus on building our tree from the known back to the unknown one step at a time, it will bring us great satisfaction to figure out the true lines that we can actually say are accurate based on our our own analysis. And I’m sure that a lot of us don’t really care that much if we can prove our lines back to a famous person. We just want to be accurate, right? We wanna have the correct ancestors.
Nicole Elder Dyer (36m 8s):
And so hopefully the steps we’ve described today can help you get a better handle on seeing what in your tree or others trees is accurate and what needs more work. And we can spend a lifetime working on building our tree and not get it back as far as, you know, some of these trees that we see in family surge or ancestry get back to. And that’s okay. You set your own goal and maybe your goal is to have a really accurate tree and not a really super long tree.
2 (36m 39s):
I think that’s a really good thing to close with. You set your own goals, what do you wanna do? And often we have kind of a pet line, a line that we just really love. Maybe it’s our surname or who knows what it is that appeals to us and we really work on that. And that’s totally fine. So here’s one that I really want to verify. I find on relative finder that I am Princess Diana’s 12th cousin, one time removed. I’m pretty sure I need to verify that because she is my, she’s my close cousin. But the interesting thing is following that I have personally researched all the way back to the Roy since it comes coming through my Royston line. Oh
Nicole Elder Dyer (37m 18s):
Wow. I’m a royston line.
2 (37m 20s):
I’ve done, it’s
Nicole Elder Dyer (37m 20s):
A royal,
2 (37m 21s):
I’ve done all that work. Well, it’s, it’s an offshoot, it’s one of the wives. So John Royston, not the immigrant, but his son is married to Elizabeth Wyatt according to Family Search. And they know there’s that Wyatt connection because we have Richard Wyatt Royston. Anyway, so apparently Elizabeth Wyatt goes back up to Sir George Wyatt, who’s Thomas Wyatt’s son, and that’s our connection. Thomas Wyatt, born 1521 in England. And again, with Princess Diana, that probably is a fairly good research line England royalty. That’s pretty important that they have those lines traced back. So I don’t know, that’s just conjecture, but it’s kind of fun that I found one that might be actually accurate.
2 (38m 1s):
Right. So fun. That’s so interesting.
Nicole Elder Dyer (38m 4s):
Yeah, the relative finder website as a side note is very fun for beginners and new people like youth or children or young adults who are not interested in genealogy. If you want to get someone interested in genealogy, then sharing that with them could be a fun way to get them interested, especially if you say, well, this could be true, but we might need to research this a little bit more.
2 (38m 29s):
Absolutely. It is a fun way, and as I said, it’s kind of a fun party game. You know, I’ve done a couple of family history fairs at our local church and we always do relative finder cuz it is entertaining. It’s just a fun way to get people connected. Well, thanks for listening and hopefully we’ve given you some ideas, maybe some motivation to work on your own tree and verify some things. And even if you’re an experienced user, you know, we find errors in our tree still, and that’s okay. Don’t feel bad. Join all the rest of us. So have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time.
Nicole Elder Dyer (39m 3s):
All right, bye bye-Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, research Like a Pro and Research like a Pro with DNA on amazon.com and other book sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family lock.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses To get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter@familylock.com slash newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to research like a pro.
Links
Support article about Ancestry hints: https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/Ancestry-Hints?language=en_US
Are you Descended from the Emperor Charlemagne? Use these volumes published by Genealogical Publishing Company to help you find out – https://genealogical.com/2021/06/28/are-you-descended-from-the-emperor-charlemagne/
Six Levels of Ancestral Profiles by Yvette Hoitink at Dutch Genealogy – https://www.dutchgenealogy.nl/six-levels-ancestral-profiles/
Tracking Research Projects in Airtable – https://familylocket.com/tracking-research-projects-in-airtable/
Relative Finder – https://relativefinder.org/#/main
Sponsor – Newspapers.com
For listeners of this podcast, Newspapers.com is offering new subscribers 20% off a Publisher Extra subscription so you can start exploring today. Just use the code “FamilyLocket” at checkout.
Research Like a Pro Resources
Airtable Research Logs Quick Reference – by Nicole Dyer – https://familylocket.com/product/airtable-research-logs-for-genealogy-quick-reference/
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
Research Like a Pro Webinar Series 2023 – monthly case study webinars including documentary evidence and many with DNA evidence – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-webinar-series-2023/
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
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