Those Elusive Ancestors Part one

We all have those pesky elusive ancestors.

Every. One. Of. Us.

How do you resolve them? Sometimes you might not ever resolve that elusive ancestor.

Don't give up yet.

I have several elusive ancestors.

I have a name for one of them. I have an approximate year of birth and state of birth. I have an approximate year of death and state of death. Still there's so much missing information. How will I bring it all together?

One step I can take is I can get in my car and drive to the two counties where he was known to live the last forty some years of his very long life. Since I'm puppy training, getting the garden ready and doing all the day to day things, that is not an option at this point.

This is where the subscription to ancestry.com comes in very handy. Before I go into how I'm taking advantage of my ancestry.com subscription, I'll tell you what I have.

I have this family located in the 1830, 1840 and 1850 census. Some of them I can follow in the 1860 census and beyond. Some of them, not so much. One I can't find in the 1860 census. That one I suspect I have found a marriage record for him and possibly I've found him in 1870 and 1880 and even possibly his death and burial record. However, I really can't tie the post 1850 record to him until I can find a record to tie my hypothesis together. The most obvious record to search for is the 1860 census.

Obviously he isn't showing up the usual way. How can I find him? I have three states where he possibly could be located during the 1860 census. Two aren't as likely as one state is. In the one state where I suspect he probably is, I have the best guess narrowed down to two counties. My job is to start with the most probable areas and physically look at each census in those counties. This is where my ancestry.com subscription more than pays for itself. I can do that search in the privacy of my home at all hours of the day.

How does on search the census for a specific state, county, township? Sign into ancestry.com. Move your cursor to search, then click on census and voter lists. When the new page opens on the right side there should be an option for US Federal Census collections. Click on that. When the new page opens, scroll down and on the left hand side of the page are the lists of census years. Click on the year you wish to search.

On the new page on the right hand side you'll need to select the state you wish to search, then the county and then the township. This is not the time to use the index, so if that's showing on your screen, click the "image only" button right above the image. Your goal is to actually look at the names on the census. The indexes are created by humans. Typos happen more often than you'd think.

Also if your ancestor happened to be staying with another family during that census they might have been indexed under that family name. Or the writing was sloppy enough, or the page was smeary enough that the one doing the indexing was taking their best guess and guessed wrong.

This is probably a family name you've seen on various census so you should have a fair idea about the different ways that surname was spelled over the years. Remember, for many of us, some of our earlier ancestors could not read or write. They didn't know how to spell their last name. Plus for our real early ancestors who migrated from one state or country to another they had an accent that might make the way they pronounced their last name very different from how you pronounce it today.

So, step one to finding the elusive ancestor is to browse the census to see if s/he is really where you thought they should have been, but were overlooked for various reasons when that census was indexed.