RLP 91: Finding Your Female Ancestors – Interview with Lisa Lisson

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 91, Finding Your Female Ancestors an interview with Lisa Lisson. 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, 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 (41s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer, co-host of Research Like a Pro, and I’m happy to be here today with my mom, Diana Elder, accredited genealogist. Hi Diana.

Diana (57s):
Hi, Nicole. So great to be here today again on the podcast. And I’m excited because we have a fun guest. We’ve got Lisa Lisson with us here today. Hi Lisa, how are you doing?

Lisa Lisson (1m 9s):
Hi. I’m doing well. Thank you for having me.

Diana (1m 12s):
We met Lisa at RootsTech, not this year, but a year ago. I had seen Lisa’s blog, but had never met in person. We meet all of our best genealogy friends at RootsTech. So fun. Well, Lisa has a great topic for us today to discuss, and that is our female ancestors, and this is one we haven’t covered yet on the podcast. So Nicole and I are really excited to talk to Lisa about this and get her ideas because we all have them. We have those illicit female ancestors that we are stuck on. There are so many of our brick walls. I know on my pedigree chart, I can’t even count, there’s so many females that are just the end of the line.

Diana (1m 56s):
So, Lisa, can you tell us a little bit about why it’s just more difficult to find these females?

Lisa Lisson (2m 3s):
Well, I think probably one of the first reasons is because our female ancestors didn’t create a lot of records on their own. They didn’t create a lot of those more legal type of records. They might show up almost, I hate to say, as an afterthought, but they might show up in a deed as a listed wife, but they don’t necessarily create many of their own records because they didn’t have a lot of legal rights on their own. And then also the issue of marriage. So their names changed. That’s probably one of the big things there. And if marriage records didn’t survive, it can be very, very difficult to untangle a woman’s maiden name. And then we have to consider, they may be, they married once, maybe they married twice, maybe three times, and each time of course we have a different name to track down.

Lisa Lisson (2m 48s):
So it can be a little sticky when you’re trying to untangle all those different names.

Diana (2m 53s):
Oh yeah. Those are some really good reasons why it’s difficult to find those females. And as you were talking, I kept thinking of all these different scenarios that I run into, especially names, not only the changing of the last names, but sometimes in those deeds or wills, you only get a first name. And of course it’s very common name. You know, you get Sarah or Elizabeth or Mary and with no maiden name that can be extremely difficult to figure out who they are. So I’m hoping we’re going to learn some strategies today for overcoming these hurdles.

Nicole (3m 31s):
Well, let’s talk about some of these strategies for finding our females. What is, what’s kind of like the first thing you would do?

Lisa Lisson (3m 38s):
The first strategy that I instruct people to do is not to overlook the obvious because a lot of times in our excitement to get started on that new research project, or maybe we found that next clue about an ancestor, isf we kind of jumped right into the databases without doing our due diligence for records that might be at home that the family might have because as genealogy researchers, we don’t really have necessarily go back too many generations to get hung up on our female ancestor and it gets stuck. And oftentimes you can still find answers to some of those family mysteries or answers within the home records or family knowledge.

Lisa Lisson (4m 19s):
So it’s important to be able to make sure we’re checking those family records. Oftentimes I tell people, check the family Bible. It’s kind of one of those big, important records that we as genealogists are always trying to find and people will frequently come back to me and say, oh, but our family doesn’t have a Bible, there wasn’t a family Bible. And I like to ask them, are you sure there’s no family Bible, because just because that didn’t come down your side of the family, it very well may have come down a collateral side of the family. So for instance, I had an ancestor and it was a male ancestor, but I was able to get him into the DAR. I was able to prove the lineage.

Lisa Lisson (5m 0s):
And as soon as I did that, I started getting emails from people and they said, how did you do this? We have been trying to connect this generation for so many years. And I said, well, it’s in the family Bible and you could have heard a pin drop. What do you mean there’s a family Bible? And I said, yes, there’s a family Bible. And it had all the females, all the wives, all the marriages. It was just all there. But because the family had not kept a Bible down that particular line, they had assumed one didn’t exist. So never assume a record didn’t exist just because you haven’t looked for it yet. You want to make sure you do your due diligence before you kind of make that assumption.

Nicole (5m 38s):
That is so important to find those family Bibles. And, you know, we have one floating around in the Dyer family, somewhere that people keep saying, they’ve heard of it, or they know of a cousin who mentioned it, and we’re still trying to track it down, but it’s one of those things that sometimes can get lost. And I even got an email from somebody on FamilySearch, who said, I saw a family Bible on E-bay that looks like it’s associated with this one of your ancestors. And they had found me because I had made changes to that ancestor’s profile on FamilySearch and the person was contacting everybody on the change list. And so then we all went and bid on the Bible and I lost. I was so sad, but it was really neat to see that somebody had kept that Bible and put it out on eBay so that other people could access it.

Nicole (6m 26s):
Because, you know, there are a lot of descendants of that couple. This one was from the 1700s. So it was really kind of a treasure. The person had taken pictures of the relevant pages and put them on the eBay page. So I could download the image of the family page. So I at least had that. So yeah, the family Bible, we have to look, we have to do our due diligence.

Diana (6m 47s):
Well, this is just reminding me of something that we’ve talked a little bit about in the past, how these databases and the easiness right now of researching sometimes makes us forget to start with home sources. You know, back in the day when my parents were researching in the sixties and seventies, they had to write letters to everybody in the family to try to get all the information. But now I think we like to just skip that step and go straight to our computer because that’s easier, isn’t it than sending an email or writing a letter. So you’re exactly right. We may be missing the obvious and not really reaching out to our close family or even a little bit more distant family to see what they have.

Diana (7m 31s):
So what is strategy number two?

Lisa Lisson (7m 34s):
Well, number two is really just a matter of you have to shift your focus. So instead of really researching your female ancestor, you want to shift your focus to researching the men in her life because the men are the ones who actually create so many of the records. So by shifting away from the female ancestor, it seems counter-intuitive, but oftentimes they will appear in the records of their husbands or their fathers, even potentially brothers. So when you research the male ancestor, you, you will increase your chance of finding the female ancestor mentioned. What I try to do is make sure that I researched any male that had any significant role in a female’s life.

Lisa Lisson (8m 19s):
So typically I start with the husband because that’s the most obvious one that we think about know about, but if I’m looking at say a husband’s deed or a husband’s will, and I see other names that I don’t recognize, but maybe they tend to appear periodically in his documents. I’m going to research those out because they very well could be collateral or they could be the males in-laws. In other words, the wife’s family, because as one researcher told me, she said, Lisa, for our rural ancestors, because I research in the south, I research a lot of rural ancestors. She said they didn’t work all day in the fields, they didn’t work that horse all day and then take that horse 10 miles down the road to go courting.

Lisa Lisson (9m 3s):
The courted where they could walk. And so that really kind of brought home that looking closer into the community is very important. So when I look at a husband or a father and I look at who were the names that are showing up frequently, what surnames I’m going to make sure I understand who everyone is to see if I can find any clues to that female, to a connection to the female. So to kind of wrap that and put a bow on it. What I tell people to do is anytime you’re researching your female ancestors, you’re researching her husband’s will, his deed, his pension records, estate records, any record that that particular husband or father created, make sure that you identify everybody who was named and make sure you research them out so that you understand the relationship that that person had.

Lisa Lisson (9m 52s):
They’re not in that particular document by chance, they’re in there for a reason. And if they were important to your female ancestors husband, they were important to her and they’re going to be important to you.

Diana (10m 4s):
That is absolutely excellent advice. I love that. You really explain that so thoroughly, because I have a lot of people that I work with, I think they’ve done everything they can on their research, but yet they haven’t even touched that FAN club because, you know, why would that be important? But of course those are going to be the people that are most important in our ancestors’ lives. Well, and I just have to just tell a real quick scenario of a pension record. I am working on a client project and the only place this woman’s maiden name is listed is in her husband’s pension record. And she states her maiden name. And so we do have to seek out all these different records.

Diana (10m 46s):
We can’t leave one stone unturned because there might just be one mention somewhere in one of those records that has the clue to lead us to more information on our female.

Nicole (10m 57s):
I love the thought of just shifting your focus from the woman to the man. I’ve kind of been working on that with my project right now. I was really hoping to be able to use mitochondrial DNA, to help identify one of the women in our tree, Susanna Clinton’s mother’s line. And so I was looking at the mother and her name maybe is Nancy, but we really don’t have any record that says her name on it that I can find. We just know that she was married to John Clanton as the first wife before 1850. So she’s one of those unnamed women that you see her as a tick mark. And then she died between 1820 and 1830. And so I’ve been focusing on her husband, John.

Nicole (11m 39s):
And what I’m really hoping is that I’ll be able to find a deed that will say her name, maybe her first name, at least. And then also the FAN club. I’m hoping that maybe somebody witnessed a land record or something that maybe that person could be a relative on his wife’s side. So that’s my research plan. I hope that I can find something about her.

Lisa Lisson (12m 2s):
It sounds like a good plan.

Nicole (12m 5s):
All right. Well, tell us more. What would you do after you focus on them?

Lisa Lisson (12m 9s):
Yeah, so after I’ve shifted my focus to the men and exhausted that line of research, then I actually will shift my attention to the children and all of their records, not necessarily just the records they created as young children, which would be very few, but certainly the birth records, a baptism record, those types of records you would want to search, but go ahead and research every single child out, as far as you can, because you can find a mother’s maiden name. I have found the maiden names listed in a child’s marriage record. I have seen them in the child’s death records, whether it be an obituary, whether it be a death certificate, if you’re in the time period that death certificates were used, but follow those children out in the records.

Lisa Lisson (12m 56s):
One of the clues that I had found was in researching a female ancestry on my husband’s side of the family, and this was an immigrant ancestor. And I spent a long time trying to find where the husband and wife came from. One of the couple had passed away early in the 1900s. The other ones subsequently died. And it was literally 20 years after they had passed away in a census record that the children named the village that both of the parents, male and female, came from back in what is today Lithuania. So I would never have thought to look in a 1930 census record for somebody who was born in the 1850s to find where they were born, but it was through their children’s record that I found that.

Lisa Lisson (13m 43s):
And so that was just enough to push that research line back a little bit further for myself.

Nicole (13m 49s):
Oh, how wonderful. That’s such a great example of using the children’s census records to find more about their mother. I love that, you know, as you were talking, I thought of one of my first research projects where I really had to shift the focus to the men and the children, and it was Lucinda and she was married to George Welch and I couldn’t find her maiden name until I looked at all of her children’s death certificates. One of the children’s death certificates said unknown for his mother’s name and one was blank. And then finally one of them said, Keaton, for the mother’s maiden name, it didn’t even say her whole name. It just said Keaton. And it was so excited because that was the only clue that I had for her maiden name out of all the kids’ death certificates, because some of the kids died before the state kept a death certificate.

Nicole (14m 38s):
So I just got really lucky on that one.

Diana (14m 41s):
You know, something else that I thought of when we’re talking about census records is the fact that sometimes these women show up in the households of their children when they’re older and might’ve lost track of a woman because you know, she’s listed in with her married name or that’s undecipherable, not in the index, but if you trace out those children, sometimes you’ll find her. And if it’s later in the census years, that might give her place of birth, just like you were talking about Lisa with the 1930 census, but even just getting a state can give us some direction. So we may not want to do all that descendancy research with the children, but yes, so important.

Diana (15m 21s):
And Nicole, I love that, that you found our Keaton ancestor through that one, that certificate. And that reminds me of Cynthia Dillard. That was the same thing. She’d married Thomas Royston, no marriage record, no hint of her maiden name until I did the death certificates and found three children that had survived to have a death certificate. And there was Dillard. And the interesting thing was when I contacted my third or fourth cousin, he said, oh, well, my middle name is Dillard. And isn’t that so funny, that was the maiden name of Cynthia. And that name had come down in his family as a common middle name for the children, but nobody had put together that that would be her maiden name.

Diana (16m 3s):
So interesting what we can find as we keep researching these children or our women ancestors. So we have gone through three different things and we have one more that maybe our listeners have not thought of. So Lisa, tell us about that number four.

Lisa Lisson (16m 19s):
Sure. Number four is to research your female ancestors role in the community. And this is probably one of my favorite things to do. It’s not easy, I’ll tell you that, but it is one of my favorite things because you know, women were not necessarily creating a lot of records for themselves, but they were absolutely active in their community and they were just leaving traces of themselves, but maybe in less obvious ways. So one of the things that might be would be for instance, community cookbooks, I don’t know if people have ever considered that their female ancestor might be in a cookbook that a group created. We all probably have these, the little spiral bound books that are sitting on our shelf in the kitchen, and they have really good recipes on them.

Lisa Lisson (17m 4s):
But if you think about it, they are from a specific group. Usually it’s a club or a church or a women’s circle and they’ll have the recipe and they’ll have the woman’s name. And there also might be some information about the organization that puts it together. It could have a roster of all the women who are actually part of that group. And so they provide a way to put a female ancestor in place and time. Sometimes you’ll have a maiden name, sometimes you won’t, but again, if you don’t look, you’ll never know. So those are really good way to search and tells you what was important to those women. If you find your ancestor in a cookbook, a community cookbook, you may find other women in the family.

Lisa Lisson (17m 52s):
Again, her mother could be named in there. A sister could be named in there and you can start to pick that out and put those pieces of the puzzle together. And they’re actually not hard to find. You can find community cookbooks that date back well into the 1800s on Google books, or you can find them at local libraries, local regional libraries. If it’s a church cookbook, I check with the church or the church archives, I would encourage you to look out there for those types of records. Church records and church directory is very similar. They are basically rosters and can put your ancestor in a time and place against sometimes you might get a little more biographical information on some of those ancestors and sometimes not.

Lisa Lisson (18m 34s):
It just sort of it’ll vary really from church to church on those as to what they include, but there’s church directories. They’re fairly easy to find. At least in my experience, I typically check with the church. If the church is still in existence, and if it’s not, then I try to find out if they have their own archives or their own historical societies, because some of the denominations do, or I’ll check with the local regional library. And then I’ll move into some of the collections at the university type libraries that are out there. They are a lot of fun to look at as well. You find some great stuff in those. Women were also in newspapers and newspapers were a big deal to our ancestors.

Lisa Lisson (19m 18s):
So you find women in newspapers. Now what I really recommend when I looked doing newspaper research, the first place I go to look, I kind of do a general scan through the paper, but then I will typically go to the society news, or it may not be called that it could be more of a community news section just depends on the community that the newspaper covers. And that’s where you find a lot of really good stuff. That’s where you find who’s visiting whom. So you might find your ancestor named there. You might find which women’s groups or meetings. So you might find your ancestor listed there. You might find what churches are in the area, which is a nice clue for you.

Lisa Lisson (19m 59s):
So then you know which churches who’s having a revival, okay. Then, you know what church that you might perhaps look for for your ancestor and explore their records as well. And of course, newspapers are available in large databases, as well as Chronically America has many of them for free. And then of course the state archives will have that. There’s also religious periodicals, which are basically religious newspapers that are just local for that church or for that region. So you would want to check with that. I typically again, check with the church themselves. I’ll check with the regional offices. If the church no longer exist to see what’s there. And then finally I check letters in journals.

Lisa Lisson (20m 40s):
Again, this kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning about not overlooking the obvious, but I asked the family members about old letters that might be tucked back in a family Bible because families were communicating. They were writing letters back and forth. Particularly if somebody left an area it’s not unusual, the women were the communicators. Typically they were the ones who were writing back and forth know how’s the weather. I don’t know why, but they always talked about the weather and they were the ones who were trying to keep up a little bit better. So you might find letters tucked in Bibles. You might find them tucked in a favorite book. You might find family photographs in the back of like the unmentionable drawer.

Lisa Lisson (21m 23s):
And you never quite know. I have found that when I am seeking out those types of records, I will ask my family usually two or three times, not to bug them, but it helps to jog their memory. And every time you ask a family member who could be an immediate family member, it could be a little more distant, a little more collateral type of family member. I never leave that conversation without asking, who else do you think I need to talk to about these types of records and the family? So you’re kind of networking genealogy style to keep moving forward. And then many researchers are not familiar with Archive Grid, but Archive Grid is a really good resource to help you check special collections across the US it is actually international for letters and journals.

Lisa Lisson (22m 14s):
Think of it as the card catalog for special collections, but again, across the US or an international to see, you can find things such as listings for letters and journals and personal papers and just a large variety of things. It’s definitely something you want to keep in your genealogy toolbox. So those are some ideas of where you can find that female ancestor as she’s living her life in the community, because she was definitely there. We just have to be a little more intentional and think a little more creatively for what types of records might have been created for her in that community.

Diana (22m 52s):
Wow. You have given us a lot of food for thought, and there are some record types that you mentioned that I’ve never used like community cookbooks. And yes, I do have a few of those sitting on my shelf and I’ve got to start looking for some of those how fun that would be to discover. And I have Southern ancestors. So that’d be really fun to get some of those good old Southern recipes from my great-grandmother’s on that side. But I was reminded when you were talking about letters and journals, of a friend who in contacting the second cousin, she discovered that this cousin had all the letters of their ancestor and they had been in her garage.

Diana (23m 32s):
If we can imagine, luckily it was in Colorado, so it was dry and they were okay. The earliest letter was from 1825. So we do never know. And I think your suggestion when talking to these cousins to ask them who else to contact is genius. I’m going to have to relisten to this episode, just to be reminded of all the great tips you’ve given us. Lisa, this has been so fun.

Lisa Lisson (23m 58s):
I love talking about my female ancestors, always.

Nicole (24m 1s):
I agree. I can’t wait to look for cookbooks and religious periodicals, so many good ideas. I had a thought also about the letters and journals that I wanted to share, I was doing a research project about one of our Mormon pioneer ancestors who migrated from Virginia over to Utah in the 1850s, and attached to the profile of one of her family members was a document with a bunch of family letters that were all transcribed. So someone in the family had inherited them and decided to do the transcription and post it up on FamilySearch. And it was a treasure trove of information about the extended family.

Nicole (24m 41s):
You’re right. They just talked about each other and the weather a lot. How’s so-and-so doing where do they live now? And it was so fun. And it actually really helped me trace one of the sisters from West Virginia, they’ve gone to Kentucky and then they’d gone to Nevada and her husband had died in a mining accident. And then they moved back to West Virginia. So tracking that through census records, I was really unsure of, you know, is this really the same family? And then when they talked about it in the family letters, that was, became really clear exactly where they had gone and why, and what had happened to her husband. So the letters just really filled in a lot of questions. So I’m glad you mentioned looking for those letters.

Diana (25m 24s):
Well, to wrap up this episode, let’s just review. So our very first tip was not overlooking the obvious to starting with what, you know, starting with home sources. And the number two was to focus on the men in the ancestors life. Number three was to focus on her children and four was to research our females in the community. So I love how that’s broken down and it gives us a real specific strategy that can really help us in our research planning. And quite honestly, this could take a while, could minutely say, if you are starting with your research plan, your whole first research plan could be not overlooking the obvious seeking out those Bibles, and then you could do another whole project on the men and so forth.

Diana (26m 13s):
So I would imagine this is going to take some time.

Lisa Lisson (26m 17s):
Oh, absolutely. It’s not a fast process at all when it comes to researching your female ancestors, because if it were, we wouldn’t be at that brick wall anyway. So one of the biggest things I always tell researchers is take your time and allow yourself the time and allow yourself the time it takes to do that. Because I think a lot of times we do get that false sense of it should be fairly quick because when we’re researching men, it’s much quicker. There’s so much online, but when we’re having to go to these lesser known records or are less easily found records, we have to just let the process take as long as it needs to take that the ancestors aren’t going anywhere.

Lisa Lisson (26m 57s):
So there’s no real hurry to it. And we just have to be sure that we’re patient as researchers.

Diana (27m 4s):
I agree. And I think one of the things that really helps us with that is good research processes, doing a whole project, keeping our research log and writing up a summary of our research so that we remember where we are, because if this is taking place over a period of time, we don’t want to forget what we did. So, you know, that’s something that we’re really a real advocate here on the Research Like a Pro podcast is doing the whole process, not just skipping around, looking for things anyway, really, really good ideas. We’re so grateful that you came on today and helped us think about our female ancestors. I’ve got so many ideas now of projects I want to return to and tackle in a better way.

Diana (27m 49s):
Thank you.

Lisa Lisson (27m 50s):
Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me over

Nicole (27m 54s):
Lisa. I think you have a freebie for our audience. Can you tell us about that?

Lisa Lisson (27m 58s):
I do. I just call it The Big Genie List, nothing too terribly imaginative there, but it’s a PDF that I created that is basically my favorite resources, databases, educational opportunities that really can kind of help us as researchers keep moving forward in that search for our ancestors. And I have a special link for your listeners, which is really just my website at www.LisaLisson.com/PRO. I’ll give you that link for the show notes as well.

Nicole (28m 30s):
Wonderful. Thank you so much. I know everyone will be excited to check it out.

Lisa Lisson (28m 34s):
Oh, you’re more than welcome.

Nicole (28m 36s):
All right. Well that was a very fun episode and we’re so happy that you came on and we will talk to everyone again next week. Thanks guys. Bye bye.

Lisa Lisson (28m 46s):
Bye.

Diana (29m 18s):
Bye bye everyone.

Nicole (29m 19s):
Thank you for listening to Research Like a Pro with Diana Elder, accredited genealogy professional and Nicole Dyer. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your own genealogy research. If you like what you heard, please leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or visit our website, FamilyLocket.com to contact us. You can find our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist’s Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.