We’ve all experienced it. We’re researching a new family and we’re working back generation-bygeneration, looking for details of each ancestor’s birth, marriage and death so we can begin to tell the stories of their lives. It’s all going swimmingly and then suddenly we run into a brick wall. Our search for Mary’s origins or for a record of Thomas’s birth fails to turn up anything promising.
We may try a different search and quickly solve the problem but what if we don’t? What if, years later, we’re still looking and we still can’t find what we’re looking for?
The classic family history brick wall
Birth records are vital to our research: an essential component in our ongoing pursuit of our ancestors, providing the crucial evidence that links us from one generation to an earlier one and it’s the failure to find the link that forms the essence of the classic family history brick wall. So, as all good researchers should, we continue to search.
But there’s a danger that in our desperate search for our ancestor’s origins we get too fixated on the idea of finding a record of their birth when what we’re actually looking for is evidence of their birth, or at least, evidence of their parentage.
The reasons why you may not find a record
There are any number of reasons
