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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Trying to work out relationship between people with the same name in the same town

My focus this week in Simcoe and the Gilchrist, McNabb and McLean side of the tree.  One thing I have noticed is that large extended familys emigrated from Scotland together and along with their neighbors settled in the same area, in my case Oro.  There were many cases were more than one child in a family married siblings from a neighboring family and this happens through the generations.  The result is a lot of people in a community with the same first and last name having children with the same first and last names as their neighbours born in roughly the same time frame....  Talk about confusion.  One way to weed through it is to look at the big picture.  Look up the parent's marriage record to confirm maiden names of the wives then find the birth registration of the children and hoping that the wife was registered with her maiden name and not married name.  Finally look up all of the death registrations to make sure they all match up.  Another resource that has help me in this endeavor is the cemetery pics available in Tombstone Territory on Wayne Cook's website.  It's not fully indexed or transcribed but with some searching around, I've been lucky in most cases in that the woman's maiden name is on the stone along with the husband and possibly (unfortunately) some children.  Using these dates helps to confirm various records as well if there are still some outstanding questions that hold up a true confirmation of records. 

What would we do without genealogy volunteers??

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