21 January Thoughts
From Genealogy Tip of the Day on Facebook
If you use AncestryDNA, you know that it assigns matches to the maternal or paternal side of the family.
Except when you're related to the match on both sides of your tree. That's what happened in the case of these two matches. They both descend from my Rampley gg-grandparents (through different children) and two different sets of maternal ggg-grandparents.
There are many ways to group your DNA matches, but to be honest sometimes the way to group them depends on your family structure.
At least that is the way it is for me.
Three children of my Neill gg-grandparents married grandchildren of my Rampley ggg-grandparents. Two of the Rampleys who married Neill siblings were siblings themselves and the other was their first cousin.
I descend from one of these Neill-Rampley marriages. It's close enough that it impacts my DNA matches--particularly the shared matches we have. I chose to put known descendants of my Neill gg-grandparents or Rampley ggg-grandparents into three categories.
Descendants of a Neill-Rampley intermarriage (this includes me).
Descendants of a Neill who didn't marry a Rampley.
Descendants of a Rampley who didn't marry a Neill.
Just a thought.
One rule doesn't fit all situations.
I remember years ago a fellow researcher was looking for a birth certificate for a relative who was born in the 1890s--supposedly in the same county as I was (although I was not born in the 1890s).
They could not locate the birth certificate despite "serious searching" and decided that the reason must have been that the county line was changed or moved. No. Just no.
I won't deny that there are times and places where county lines are in flux. Most of the time the majority of the change in county lines is when an area is in the early days of settlement and, as population grows and people move, new counties need to be formed. Occasionally, for one reason or another, a line needs to be modified or tweaked .
But the county where I'm from was formed in 1825. The surrounding counties were all formed by the end of 1841 (just checked) and there was no tweaking of the county boundaries after counties were cut out. The part of the state where I'm from tends to use rivers or survey lines as boundaries and other than perhaps moving things ever so slightly to correct a survey there's been no line change.
But my correspondent insisted because she'd heard the "county borders changing was the reason you can't find birth certificates" and there was no getting it out of her head.
My comments wondering if the family moved across the county line, if the mother went home to have the baby, if the year of birth was off, if there was another spelling or variant of the name, or did the people always live in the same place, etc. all fell on deaf ears. Those are reasons the record may not exist--in addition with the potential for records being lost or no longer extant. It had to be the changing of the county line according to her worldview.
It's also possible her ancestors (or the doctor or midwife) failed or refused to record the birth. It was in the 1890s and in Illinois there wasn't a state mandate to record births and deaths--although in my experience most counties were recording the majority of them.
Now if she was researching in Virginia in 1600s or early 1700s and couldn't find a land record then it could be that the county line was the problem. If she can't find a birth certificate in Virginia in that time period, the county line has nothing to do with it as they weren't recording them at that point in time.
It's good to learn genealogy process and procedures along with historical facts to help your research. It's even better to learn when to apply those things.
This tip and others can be found in our books which are on our website.
Today’s tip from our blog www.genealogytipoftheday.com
If a relative appears to have gotten married for the first time at a slightly older than normal age, look again. That first marriage might not have been the actual first marriage.
For a female, this means that what you think is a maiden name may not really be a maiden name at all but could be the last name of a previous husband. Not all marriage records ask how many times the bride and groom have been married before and not all records use a “Miss” or “Mrs.” before the bride’s name. And since men’s last names don’t change upon marriage, it is even easier for a man to have a first marriage that’s unknown to the genealogist.
Family stories about these marriages do not often get passed down to the current generation, especially if there were no children for the marriage or the marriage had a confrontational ending.
Until next time,
Michael
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