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.

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.

DNA is all the rage in our modern era with “rapid” DNA testing. Family Tree DNA is the one most focused on genealogy and surname studies. Such testing is non-invasive, it is just a swab of the cheek. One sample can be tested multiple times as new tests become available. It does not make sense to test a father and son as there is very little difference in their Y chromosome unless there is a mutation.

There are two ways that DNA testing is used. The first is DNA Surname studies. These test the Y chromosome of men with that surname. This can be a good way to verify that you are related to the famous person with a certain last name as per family stories. However, it requires that you have a living male relative with the surname to be tested.

One needs to be prepared for both surprises and disappointments. Surprises come from so-called non-paternal events. This can be as simple as an unknown adoption in the past, or grandma had some fun before she married grandpa or while she was married to grandpa.

The disappointment angle comes in if you are using DNA for a fairly common surname, you could wait years for a match. In my case, we finally found a match on the other side of our brick wall, but we can’t find the paper trail to figure out how we are related.

The other type of testing is Mitochondrial DNA which is passed down by the mother. A man only passes his DNA to his sons, so if you have a generation you want to research without any sons, you will have to hope to find a connection with a living male relative to be tested. for women, unless someone has paid to have such a test, it will limit it.

The male and female lines revealed by DNA testing is only the direct male and female line of the individual tested. This will look like the widening arms of the letter “V”. The white space in the “V” represents all the other grandparents, and great grandparents whose DNA does not exists as an X or Y chromosome in the individual who is tested.

So there is a place for DNA testing, but it is very focused on the information it will reveal.

Citations are critical in genealogy research. A citation is merely a way to indicate the source of your information. It can be an obituary, what newspaper and date? It can be a census, what are the specifics of the census.

By making citations of where we find different information and adding it to our genealogy notes or program, we can determine if we have looked at the source for everyone in our tree or not. It also helps us keep track of what we have already looked at and can save us from looking at the same source multiple times. (Making copies of sources is also a good idea.)

Citations also allow fellow researchers to verify our work, or for you to verify the information you get from another researcher.

If you are interested in joining DAR or SAR or similar organizations, your citations will be critical. If no one can verify your work, it is just like a research paper in school, it is no good without footnotes and a bibliography.

A citation is not the same as a conclusion. A citation is only where the information comes from. A conclusion is based upon the evidence you have found. Obviously, you are a witness to your existence and those of the family members for whom you have personal knowledge, but how do you prove it? You prove your conclusions based on the evidence your citations point to.

If you find that great-grandma lied about her age in different directions on different censuses, how do you know how old she really was, or when she was really born? Often birth certificates had a different date than death certificates. One may have to use both dates until one finds something else to confirm one over another.

Brick Walls describe the situation where you have hit the limits of your paper trail and maybe even your family stories.

You don’t know who the parents of Franklin are, or maybe you know their names and a bit about them, but you can’t go any further back.

Brick walls are hard to break down. Sometimes you need a ladder or to find a gate.

Unfortunately, some ancestors seemed to avoid the census taker and the tax man. Some may vanish from one census to the next. Did they die of disease? Did they move somewhere I am not looking? Ten years between censuses in the U.S. is a long time. Just think of all the things you have done in the last ten years and how many places you have lived?

There have been ten year periods in my life that I lived in nearly ten different places.

The best ways to overcome brick walls is to look at collateral lines, research aunts, uncles, and cousins, maybe you can find what you are looking for by finding a long lost cousin who has the family Bible or who stumbled on the right piece of information to pick up the trail.

For some people, a surname DNA study may be helpful. A surname DNA study tests the Y chromosome, men only, and looks for matches. If you do not have a living male in that line, you can’t do that.

A mitochondrial DNA study is for the female side. Brothers and sisters will have the same mitochondrial DNA line as their mother.

Anhentafel is German for Ancestor Table.

It is a numbering system that is used to signify what generation. It allows one to calculate relationships and generations.

I am far from knowledgeable about this. I get the concept, but could not do the calculations without a lot of reading and a cheat sheet nearby.

One need not use Ahnentafel or understand it when starting out, or at all.

The ultimate goal of genealogy is to find all the ancestors you can.

Ahnentafel is not as needed a tool to determine relationships since most genealogy programs, even free ones, have utilities to calculate how two people are related.

After getting going on my RPG blog ad keeping up with it, I have decided to join the April, 2014 A to Z Blogging Challenge for this, my genealogy blog also. For this year, my ideas are generic to genealogy as a whole. I will try to add something to each one about my own genealogical research. I selected the Education (ED) category, since their is not Genealogy category. Miscellaneous (MI) appears to be the next closest category. This blog is the 750th entry on the list.

As with my RPG blog, I got a power start on the April blogging challenge with this blog. I made a title and copied each letter graphic for all 26 of the A to Z posts and scheduled them for the appropriate day. Now just to write each post before the scheduled day.   I came up with a topic for all but two of the days. For several days I have a sentence or paragraph to get started.

My suggestion to anyone who wants to do any kind of blog challenge is to make a draft  with a placeholder title and schedule them for the appropriate day and add the tags you know apply. When you actually write for that day adjust the title and category tags as needed. I know I am not a regular blogger with tons of followers, but for me that gets the item out there. If it is not a challenge that needs something tomorrow, you can focus on the ones for which you have solid ideas. For the ones you aren’t sure about or have multiple ideas, you have a place to add your ideas. If you have enough ideas, you can split them off as drafts for future use for next year, or some other blog challenge. Doing the 40th Anniversary Blog Hop helped me come up with a ton of ideas and remember things I wanted to record for later. Instead of having 3 or 4 or more posts for one day, I realized this morning that I should have scheduled them so that I had one every day, so I’d be into next week by now.

To sum up, my suggestion is to let your tool, blogging software of your choice, do the hard parts. Put in a framework so all you have to do is flesh it out. I use WordPress and am self-hosted, so I know my suggestion works for WordPress users. I would imagine Blogger and other blogging tools would allow you to do the same.