Author Archives: Larry Hamilton

About Larry Hamilton

This site is to help me organize my thoughts, process, and information. It will give others insight into what to do or not do in ones search for ancestors.

M is for Mountains of Papers, Notes and Research.

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Genealogical research can quickly result in mountains of papers, notes, and research.

Some items you will want a paper copy, like birth and death certificates. Although that is not required.

In the current technology of the computer age, you can easily digitize important information.

Newspaper clippings are a great example. They are very acidic and breakdown quickly over time. Be sure to make a note of what paper, page, and date and make a digital copy.

All the digital copies must be backed up, just in case. Every computer/computing device fails at some point. A verified backup is critical.

I have inherited ten banker boxes of notes and research from my parents. It is a large task to go through and sort and determine what must be scanned and kept, like family letters; and what can be scanned and trashed or composted.

L is for Laws

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It is now harder to get information because of the “War on Terror” and subsequent laws.

May states now limit how far back and how easily you can get records for family members. If you don’t have birth and death certificates for your parents, grandparents, etc., you now have more hoops to go through to get them if they were born less than 100 years ago. The argument is that the terrorists will use the SSN’s of deceased people to get fake ID’s. However, if the agencies that issue ID’s will run a check of a SSN against the SSDI you either catch fraud or a very rare instance of someone whose SSN shows they are dead.

The SSDI, the Social Security Death Index, is another example. Because agencies that are supposed to look at the SSDI to see which Social Security Numbers are for people who are now deceased and don’t it is now blocked from free access for some websites. This got a lot of attention a few years ago when a criminal used a dead baby’s SSN to make a false tax refund claim. The parents got upset and Ancestry.com who acquired the free Rootsweb.com service several years ago, shut down the SSDI accessible via Rootsweb.

Rootsweb had a great feature with the SSDI where you could add notes. I added notes for every family member I found in the SSDI. Unfortunately, I learned of the death of older cousins of my parents and grandparents from the SSDI. Now, all those notes are lost and no one searching my line will find them.

Something that our tax dollars pay for should not require us to pay money to access.

Common sense when it comes to adding new laws and enforcing existing laws is sorely lacking because some people value total security over freedom.

Laws can’t keep us safe from everything. No law will stop the train near my house from ever jumping the tracks and hitting my house, for example. Preventing easy access to the records we need does not stop crime and only aggravates honest citizens interested in their family history.

Can you tell that I’m just a little aggravated by this? You can still access the records you need, there are just a lot more hoops than there need to be. Common sense tells us that laws are only obeyed by honest people. Criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law.

Too many laws are more of a hindrance to the law abiding and have no effect on criminals.

It was already illegal to obtain records under false pretenses and use them for illegal activity. Since those laws did not work, why do politicians think that adding more laws will make a difference? Simple enforcement of existing laws that don’t hinder the law abiding would be much better.

I is for Investigate Leads

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You must follow up on all the leads your research and interviews reveal. Rule out things you are told as true or false. Find the paper trail to back up stories and your deductions.

Genealogical research is a lot like being a detective. In fact, there are some genealogists that specialize in tracking down family members of someone who has left an estate with no known heirs.

H is for Hamilton

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There are lots of stories that people with an ancestor named Hamilton are related to Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

I know that I am not related to him. I also know that 90% plus of families with a story that they are related are wrong.

The man only had two of his children who had children that lived long enough to repeat the process. After a little over 200 years later, he has about 250 known living descendants. It is very unlikely you are descended from the man. A known descendant is a participant in the Hamilton Surname DNA study, so if you have a living male relative with the Hamilton surname, you can quickly determine if you are a descendant or cousin.

Alexander had one brother, James, but there is no record of him every coming to the U.S.

It is possible that you could be distant cousins, but a paper trail is still needed to explain how you are related.

For the majority of people with the Hamilton surname, your relationship to Alexander Hamilton, the one on the ten dollar bill, is that you share the same surname.

Alexander is a very common name among Scottish people and their descendants. You may be descended from AN Alexander Hamilton, but not THE Alexander Hamilton.

G is for GEDCOM

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GEDCOM is an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication. It is a data transmission standard developed by the LDS church, Mormons, for moving data between different genealogy programs.

It is an old standard and not maintained. There are some efforts for an new standard.

The issues with it are that it is not designed to deal with certain types of data or conclusions.

It is helpful in that it is a text file and you can make sense of it by reading it.

The best use of it is for sharing data with other researchers who are researching one or more of your family lines. It is also a good backup. If you backup your database to GEDCOM periodically and have it in a safe place, if your computer dies, you can import it into a new program without data lose. This is in addition to backing up your genealogy program’s native database format.

GEDCOM is also used for the various popular genealogy websites to upload your data to them, and you can download GEDCOMs from them.

Be careful with downloading GEDCOMs from online sources as it is up to you to verify the information in them is accurate. If you merge a gad GEDCOM into your database, you cannot “un-merge” it. This illustrates the importance of frequent and verified backups.

A verified backup is one that you have tested and know that it can be used to restore your data.

F is for Family Stories

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Family stories are a great way to add flavor to the research and can give a direction to research.

However, often there are family stories that because you share the same surname as someone famous that you are related to that person. If there is a relationship, prove it. Find the documentation to back it up.

My maternal grandmother was a Burns. He father related that his father maintained they were related to Robert Burns, the Scottish poet and were third cousins. Based on my parents research, if there is a connection it is more like fifth cousins. Robert Burns had no known sons, so one can’t prove easily via DNA that there is a connection. One of my grandmother’s nephews, a son of one of her brothers, submitted his DNA to the Burns Surname DNA Project, and so far the matches found are not conclusive to tie into the known descendants of others in Robert Burns’ male line, i.e. cousins, etc. The paper trail is difficult as well. So while there might be a connection, it is not as easy to prove as one might think.

However, you can’t just dismiss family stories, for there is a grain of truth in all of them. If you share a last name with a famous person, you at the very least have the same last name. If you can never find the paper trail or DNA testing to prove it, then you still have a story. See if you can find the origin of the story and maybe why it got started. Get details. If all the story is “We are related.”, then you will have a hard time getting anywhere with it. If the story is, your great grandmother married the great great grandson of this famous person, then the job is easier.

Ancestry – Good Resources – Except for Member Trees

I saw this on EOGN.

Ancestry is an Excellent Genealogy Resource, but its Member Trees? Not So Much

 

Writing in The Jersey Journal, Daniel Klein describes his experiences with Ancestry.com’s member-contributed family trees. He describes the problem caused by novice genealogists using information from a reasonably reputable source (The US Census) and applying it to the wrong person. Now other people have accepted this erroneous information as gospel and it perpetuates over and over. You can read Daniel Klein’s article here.

E is for Everyone in the family

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The best way to go back as far as you can is to research everyone in your family. That is every line or branch of your tree.

You may find that a few generations back that cousins married and your research is reduced if you research every line. This is especially important in the U.S. if your ancestors moved west and all passed through the same states as they moved west. You may find some of them in the same places at roughly the same time. There is a chance that they met or knew each other before their decedents that resulted in you were born.

Also if you research all of your family lines as you go back you avoid doing the research until the oldest person in that line is gone and you can’t interview them.

You will also find cousins who are researching that line, and if they do good work, you can easily graft their research onto your tree after verifying it and not have to do all the legwork on that line yourself.