Researching Records and Reconstructing Lives

Memories take you back a generation or two. Records take you the rest of the way. The goal of this part isn’t just to find a name in an index. It’s to reach the point where you can say, “I understand something about this person’s life.”

Where the answers are

Match each question in your research plan to the records most likely to answer it:

You want to know	Records to try	Good to know, and where to look
Where they lived, and with whom, every ten years	U.S. federal census, 1790–1950, and state censuses	1850 is the first to name every person in a household; 1880 adds each person’s relationship to the head; 1900–1930 ask the year of immigration. Most of the 1890 census was lost in a 1921 fire. FamilySearch (free), Ancestry, the National Archives.
Births, marriages and deaths	Certificates; church baptisms, marriages and burials	Most states only began requiring statewide birth and death registration in the early 1900s. Before that, look for town, county and church records. State vital records offices, county clerks, FamilySearch.
When and how they arrived	Passenger lists and naturalization papers	Naturalization papers after 1906 usually give a birthplace and arrival details. National Archives, FamilySearch, and the Ellis Island Foundation for New York arrivals.
Military service	Draft registration cards, service records, pension files	About 24 million men registered for the World War I draft in 1917–18. A 1973 fire destroyed millions of 20th-century Army and Air Force files, so check discharge papers at home and copies filed with the county recorder.
Land and property	Deeds, mortgages, federal land patents	Deeds are kept by the county recorder. Federal land patents are free on the Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office site.
Family relationships and possessions	Wills and probate files	Often name every living child and a married daughter’s husband. County probate court; many are on FamilySearch.
Everyday life	Newspapers: obituaries, wedding notices, social columns, ads	Small-town papers reported visits, illnesses and parties. Chronicling America (free), state newspaper projects, Newspapers.com.
Work, school and community	City directories, school records, yearbooks, local and county histories	City directories fill the years between censuses. Libraries, historical societies, the Internet Archive.

Free places to start: FamilySearch, the National Archives, Chronicling America for old newspapers, the BLM General Land Office records, and Find a Grave. Don’t forget the public library and county historical society where your ancestor lived; many records were never put online.

Search smarter

Spell it every way. Clerks wrote what they heard, and indexers misread handwriting. Novak might be Nowak, Novack or Nowack. Try wildcards such as Nov*k where the site allows them.
Search a range of years. Ages in old records drift by a year or two, sometimes more. Search plus or minus two to five years.
Search by place. In a small town, browsing the census page by page is often faster than fighting a bad index.
Follow the whole family. If you can’t find Anna, search for her husband, children, siblings or neighbors. Genealogists call this the FAN club: friends, associates and neighbors.
Go back to the original. An index is someone’s reading of a record. Always look at the image of the record itself.
Log every search, including the ones that found nothing, so you don’t repeat them.

Want a walkthrough of a records site? See Family Search Indexing: How Do I Find Records?

Weigh the evidence

Records disagree all the time. When they do, ask two questions about each one: Who gave this information? and How would they know? A death certificate is reliable for the date of death. The birth date on it was given by a grieving relative, often decades after the birth.

Example

Here’s what Anna Novak’s records say about her birth year:

Source	Points to	Who gave the information
1903 passenger list, age 19	about 1884	Anna herself, when she sailed
1910 census, age 26	about 1884	Someone in the household
1920 census, age 37	about 1883	Someone in the household
1951 death certificate	2 Feb 1886	Her son, nearly 50 years later
Interview with granddaughter Mary	1885	Family memory

The two earliest records, closest to Anna herself, agree on about 1884. Her great-grandson records “born about 1884” and keeps a note explaining why. He’ll keep looking for a baptism record in Bohemia that could settle it.

Write your reasoning down whenever records conflict. A note like that is worth more to future researchers than the date itself.

From a name to a life

Once you’ve found a few records, line them up in order and read them as a story:

Build a timeline of every record you’ve found: where they were, who they were with, what they did.
Read the whole page. Who lived next door? Were the neighbors from the same village? Was the house owned or rented?
Look up their work. What did a “breaker boy” or a “hostler” actually do? (See Old Job Descriptions.)
Add the history around them. A family that lost two children in 1918 lived through the influenza pandemic. A farm sold in 1933 tells you about the Depression.
Map their moves. Seeing the distance between towns makes a life real. (Here’s how with Google Earth.)

Example

In 1910 the census shows 26-year-old Anna married to Joseph, a coal miner, renting rooms in Scranton with three other families from Bohemia. A 1912 newspaper mentions a mine accident on Joseph’s street. Suddenly Anna isn’t a name anymore; she’s a young mother in a mining town, surrounded by neighbors who spoke her language.

Your assignment

A few sessions over a week or two. Take your time here.

Find your chosen ancestor in at least two census years.
Find one birth, marriage or death record for them.
Find one other kind of record: a newspaper item, draft card, land record or passenger list.
Build a simple timeline of their life from what you’ve found, with a source for each entry.
Note any records that disagree, and write down which you trust more and why.