How Big is Your Puzzle?

Your Research Question Equals the Size of the Puzzle

As usual, when trying to think of what to write about, something prompts the writer; and for me that is often what I've been recently working on. These days, I'm puzzling over my DNA matches tracing back to my third-great-grandparents, George Henry and Martha Willis McBee. Thrulines® at Ancestry.com has been a useful map from my ancestors to the matches. 

The Map Is Not The Territory

But ThruLines® are not "True" lines. They are created by algorithms from Ancestry user trees including our own; all trees are imperfect, including ours. The same process creates The Theory of Family Relativity™ at MyHeritage. Neither tool reveals all the details we might wish about living people, so they leave us with work to do.

Fortunately, I began my research to understand my family and find living cousins, so I've been "building down" for many years. When DNA became a useful new record source, I was already partly prepared. Still, now working with third, fourth and even fifth cousins, I'm left with lots of puzzles to solve, even with a map to get me part-way there.

As I strive to become a better, more accurate and efficient researcher, developing good habits is important. I begin with the known and work with those facts to find the unknown. Believe it or not, working "down" the tree is actually easier than working back to the past, because the work of establishing your ancestor's life has been done, and some or all of their children are known as well. This is sometimes known as "collateral research."

At first I resisted doing this, because "everyone" was trying to find their most distant ancestors, and "doing all that extra work" seemed a waste of time. Hearing and reading multiple case studies changed my mind, and I realized that these closer relatives were interesting, easier to research, and gave more insight to the lives of the previous generation as well. 

Methodically working with each of those children of ancestral couples and then their children's children down to the living, I find censuses to work with as a skeleton for the research. Multiple record sets such as vital, military, land, tax, probate and cemetery records flesh out the tree and, increasingly frequently, newspaper stories and obituaries become the ultimate prize, illustrating their life as a whole.

Obituaries: A Map Within the Map

I routinely scour all online resources to find obituaries because in them I find or confirm the main facts of the person's life and death. Usually the family members are listed, the birth and death dates, sometimes marriage date and place; often education, occupation, club and union affiliations, and the location where they lived and died. With luck, marriage partners are noted, and sometimes how a marriage ended, and who the children of that marriage were. Sometimes, just reading the obituary answers doubts, or proves that  I've been chasing two people with the same name.

Here is a recent prize, the obituary of the second husband of my research interest, Lora Ingram (misspelled Laura in the obit):

South Idaho Press, Burley, Idaho, Monday 19
October 1981, page 2, column 1, Lon Mortensen
obituary; Newspapers.com : accessed 21 March 2024.

The first question is, why did I search for his obituary rather than Lora's? I did search for hers and didn't find one yet. An important research tip with working with female ancestors is to search for the men associated with them. In our history men have been more highly valued and tend to create more public records, including obituaries. 

In this case, I went even further, and also found his mother's obituary. Lon and Lora and their two young children had actually lived with his family in 1940. Their children grew up around his relatives as well as hers.

Widening the Focus

Elsie Ellen Bennett Mortensen's obituary in The Missoulian, Missoula, Montana, Saturday 28 July 1979, shed light on her own life and that of her family as well. In part, it said that she "operated a rooming house in Polson for many years" and that "she was born June 14, 1881, at Kaysville, Utah, the daughter of William and Lucy Bennett," and then "on Sept. 3, 1898, she married Peter Mortensen. 

"The couple came to the Moise Valley from Declo, Idaho, in 1923. Following her husband's retirement in 1947, the Mortensens moved to Polson. Mr. Mortensen died in 1954." 

So while they moved to Polson for his retirement, she was running a rooming house! 

More light on my fourth cousin's kin: "Survivors include six sons, Lon, Freeman, Robert, all of Eugene, Ore.; Bill, Palermo, Calif.; Lewis, Landcaster [sic], Pa.; and Ray, Belgrade; three daughters, Ellen Stevens, Declo, Idaho; Della Harter, Rittsburg, Ohio; and Virginia Howel, Roundup." My cousins are part of the 36 grandchildren she left, and their children part of the several great-grandchildren mentioned. -The Missoulian, Missoula, Montana, Saturday 28 July 1979, page 12, column 4, Elsie Ellen Mortensen obituary; Newspapers.com : accessed 22 March 2024.

Widening the focus doesn't always make the puzzle bigger; sometimes it just makes it easier to find where each piece of the puzzle fits. It IS worth the work!

How have YOU found your way through a puzzle in your research? Tell us about it! Write to m.strickland@skcgs.org

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Valorie Zimmerman