Quicksand Ahead

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Used with permission from Steven Young Caudill, photographer


Will Rogers is reported to have said, "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." Recently I found myself in a hole of my own making, and took that advice. My first step was a new custom Tree Tag for my Ancestry.com tree: SameNameConfusion to make the profiles easy to find.

Previously I wrote about pruning, part of which has been using Ancestry.com's ProTools to find possible duplicate profiles. I've merged hundreds of such profiles without problems. This case seemed simple and obvious on the surface because I saw what I expected to see, rather than what was actually there. 

  • I saw Jane and Eliza J and thought they were the same woman
  • I saw Thomas J Booth and Jefferson Booth, and thought that they were the same man
  • Because both families were in the 1900 census, I did not stop to notice that one family was in Missouri and the other in Iowa 

The Jane with no surname had little information, so I merged them. But then, I saw: 


UH OH! What happened?


What I failed to do was look at the census record in each profile and pay attention to what each record stated. Not only did each "Jane" marry a man with what I guessed was the same name, some of their children had similar names, too.  So what I "knew" was not what the records show, as you can see below. My Booths loved to name boys after presidents and other famous men from American history, which in my haste I forgot. 

By the way, if the census had been the same record, it would not have shown up twice; Ancestry does a very good job  when merging duplicate profiles. 

This careless merge conflated not just the women but the husbands and children; two families merged. So now the task is to sort them out, beginning with what Ancestry presented: two 1900 Census images. 



Now that I'm deep in the "other Jane's" profile, I'm glad I made this careless mistake, because it has taught me some lessons and provided valuable context for both families. 

Most important: once merged, there is no magic UNDO button, so it is worth the time to read the documents. Modern browsers make it easy to look at records side by side, and compare the details. 

Researching both families is interesting. In this case, none of the people are actually named the same. Thomas Jefferson Booth and Jefferson Booth are relatives of one another. Jefferson is a son of Charles Booth, who is possible brother of my direct Booth ancestor Jonathan Booth who both came to the Missouri Territory from Virginia. Two of the three brothers, according to the stories, came to the Territory with their mother Elizabeth Ferguson Booth after their father Charles Sr. died in Virginia. 

The two women I confused, Eliza Jane Evans and Jane Cain, used "Eliza J" and "Jane/ Janie" consistently, and were not related. Both were daughters of different pioneer families. All are part of the FAN (Family, Associates, Neighbors) club. 

My takeaway: Start with the documents, and proceed to enter the facts. Clean up as research continues; disconnect erroneous relationships and remove links to incorrect records. This is regular work. None of us guess correctly 100% of the time. Sometimes tables are needed to sort out a complicated problems; this one was simple once I actually paid attention to the records.

When I have Charles and Jonathan Booth's descendants down to the 1950 census, it will be fun to see if any autosomal DNA matches show up on both branches. I'll check out the Booth Y DNA project over on Family Tree DNA and see if there are any matching lineages there. And perhaps someone has even more information about these Booth branches in Wikitree, and riches await in FamilySearch Full Text Search. 

One of the first books I purchased  about my family history was Charles Boothe (C.A. 1774-1821) and Descendants by Evelyn Booth Massie, 1978. While she had access to few original records, so far her book has been a good guide to finding those records. My thanks to all the researchers of the past who knocked on doors, interviewed family members, and authored works to guide our modern research.

Valorie Zimmerman

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Send your stories to m.strickland@skcgs.org





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