Brick Walls

All of us have them. In genealogy, they are that ancestor that just appears, as if out of no where.

No known mother. No known father. No known siblings.

One day they appear on a record in a state, sometimes with an already made family.

I could tell you all the things I know about one of my brick wall ancestors, but the truth is, unless you're part of my family, directly or indirectly, you won't care about my specific brick wall.

You want to know how to break through your own brick walls. You don't really care what I know or don't know or want to know about my brick wall.

So, let's not talk about the brick walls, those motherless, fatherless, siblingless ancestors of ours.

Let's talk about research and what we know about our families as they migrated across the states. I'll insert here that I don't know enough about immigrant ancestors to know if this holds true for them or not, so lets concentrate on our ancestors that we are pretty sure are not our immigrant ancestors.

It was the exception, not the rule, for an ancestor to migrate alone. If the first record that proves your ancestor was somewhere also shows a wife and children, then the chances are extremely minute that he migrated alone with their family.

Today we like having a backup plan in case something goes wrong. The same was true in 1800. That backup plan usually meant close friends, or close family. A brother. A sister and brother-in-law. Cousins. An uncle. We just don't know until we scour every document.

That is where the catch is. I know some of the brick walls are true brick walls.

For most of us, they aren't true brick walls. Have you gone to the county where your ancestor last lived and seen about a will or any probate records? Have you gone to the surrounding counties and had the same check done? Have you checked the tax records of that county and the surrounding counties?

Did you ancestor live on a county or state line? Have you searched for any and all church records? Have you gone through the Federal Census records? I don't mean an indexed search. Have you actually looked at every page of the census in the township and county where your ancestor lived? Have you searched every page of the surrounding townships or even the whole county?

Indexers get the majority of indexing right, but is your brick wall ancestor one of the few they got wrong? Mine was. Had I not done an actual search of the scanned images of the Federal census I would never have found him. He was indexed wrong. He won't show up on your typical search.

Have you scanned the pages and pages of marriage records in the county where your ancestors lived. Again, not the indexes to those marriage records, but the actual images. You'll find mistakes there, too.

All of this takes time. A lot of time in most cases.

My brick wall ancestor is a brick wall right now only because I haven't gone through every census record, page by page, township by township, county by county in New York state in 1810. It sounds like an overwhelming tasks. It's not an easy taste, but it's one of the things I have to do before those who have been doing a lot longer than I have will finally agree with me that I have a real brick wall ancestor. I put that brick wall up myself.

He's not a true brick wall because there's still so many documents that have to be viewed either the digitalized images, the microfilm, or the actual documents before he can be an honest brick wall.

Sadly, there are many who will claim their ancestor a brick wall ancestor as soon as they stop finding things easily on the internet. Considering only about 10% of the documents are on the internet, you can't call your ancestor a brick wall until those 10% and the other 90% have been viewed. Then if you come up empty, you probably have a true brick wall.

While you're looking for documents on your stubborn ancestor, notice the names that keep coming up again and again. In my case, I can't find out anything about my ancestor before 1820. In 1820 he was in Ohio. Before that he was in New York. I've come up empty in New York doing the quick and easy internet search.

He magically appears in Ohio and just as magically disappears in Ohio. Out of three of his sons whom I identified, I've only found a death record for one of them that I can positively tie to his son. Since my ancestor was pushing 100 years of age in the last census where I found him, it's very reasonable to believe he died in Ohio instead of believing he migrated yet again.

I wish he'd migrated again, then I could compare names from Ohio to his new location. He didn't give me that option. I told you he was stubborn. However, one of his grandson's migrated. With any luck, I'll eventually be able to tie some of those names of people who tended to migrate with him back to Ohio. I'm positive none of the grandson's siblings migrated with him. I can't rule out cousins though. I don't know the maiden surname of his grandmother, nor do I know any of his mother's siblings.

Did your brick wall ancestor or one of their sons sign a sworn statement for a neighbor filing a military pension? Or sign a sworn statement for a widow of someone in the Revolutionary War, or the War of 1812, even the Civil War? If so, do a quick trace of that family. Could they be related to you? Could the husband or the widow be the sibling of your brick wall ancestors wife that you don't know her maiden surname?

Don't forget, pregnancy and childbirth caused the death of a lot of women. There are a lot of half-siblings due to that fact. Many of the men remarried and had more children with the new wife. Men also died, leaving women alone to raise their children. The women often times remarried and had more children with their new husband. Those half-siblings when it was the mother who survived and remarried will have different last names, unless she married her late husband's brother.

This is only a small list of possibilities. I've only scraped the tip of the genealogical iceberg on scenarios and records we might overlook and call an ancestor a brick wall.

I still call my ancestor a brick wall ancestor. Really he's not. He's a stubborn one. But he's far from a brick wall. The only brick wall I've got concerning him, is the one I built because the rest of the digging will not be easy.

Make sure your bricks walls are really brick walls your ancestor set up, not ones you've built yourself.