It isn't all click and add....

Sometimes people get the impression that they can sign up for Ancestry, and get all of the information they want just by using the hints that are suggested to them. It is great if the hints are correct, but a lot of times they are not.

The real fun of the research comes in when you examine the records and find something new. Or you look at records in a different way to bring about more and more hints.

Case in point is a brick wall I have been working on for a few years.  My GG grandparents James Guider and Mary Robinson have been hard couple to research. One, because on his first census James and his sister were living with guardians and Mary because Mary Robinson is such a common name.

I had a picture of a man named Geroge HULTZ I couldn't exactly make out my grandmother's writing, which stated that he was a cousin of Zua May Guider my Great Grandmother, a daughter of the brick walls. Well I was able to find a George Hultz on the census and built his tree and followed his descendants all with no luck.  I placed him on the back burner as he was not paying off after hours of research.

A few days ago, however, I was paging again through my grandmother's old address book looking at names and I saw Leva HULTY's name again. Now I have photo's of Leva with Charles DAVIS who lived in Chicago and was son to Mary's first daughter by her first husband (before GUIDER).  The DAVIS boys were only partially interesting to me because they were only related to me through one great great grandparent, Mary.  Also there was a case of the second DAVIS boy, George's will. When he died his estate was contested by some orphan girls in Michigan who claimed to be descended of Charles.  Leva, I thought, was Charles' girlfriend.  I had never really pursued her.

Well I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the DNA evidence lately, so I decided to do some old fashioned research. First, I went hunting for the address that was in my grandmother's book.  I tried to find the address on the census maps and paged though the census records for 1900, 1920 and 1930 with no luck. Then I went online to see if I could find any historical directories for Chicago. I found one from 1920 and decided to see if I could find her.  Going through the alphabetical listings, I found a Lena HULTS. Not only had I misread my grandmothers writing for the first name but also the last name.

Bang. I plugged that name into my database and a census record popped up with George HULTS and Emma HULTS as the parents.  This was very exciting. I had fit two pieces of my puzzle together in a way I hadn't imagined before.

This whole time I had been researching the wrong George.

Armed with the knowledge of the correct George I was able to trace his records and find his parents. Since George was the cousin I was looking for, it was going to be one of his parents that was brother or sister to my brick walls.

Quickly I narrowed it down as George's father was from New York.  No one on this branch of the tree had any connection to NY as far as I knew. That left his mother Lydia. The biggest problem was that Lydia had no maiden name. If I had relied on the hints from Ancestry, I quickly would have gone off in the wrong direction. Instead I pulled up each census record I had already found, and looked closely at it. One census record for the HULTS family had the mother living with her son when she was very old. This is very common and a great way to get missing information. On this record her name had changed to HUBBARD.  After plugging in the information for this, I saw where all of the mistakes on Ancestry had come from. All of the hints were for the wrong people. The Ancestry researchers had just accepted the first clues without really delving into the logistics of it. It was a few pages down where I found the correct Lydia HUBBARD. Ancestry volunteers had mistakenly had her listed as the wife of a completely incorrect person. The correct husband was listed on the record but not near his wife. He was a hotelier in Michigan and Lydia was listed a few rows down from him as wife... but the volunteers had chose the man listed directly above her as the husband. I was able to confirm all of this, because as I looked down the guest list at the hotel, I was to discover Lydia's son was staying at the hotel, using his middle name of Oscar.  Now that I had Lydia's husband's name I could start researching them.

There were no real records of interest for Lydia Hubbard or George Hubbard.  Until I found a record again, by looking closely at each non-hint record. In one I found a wedding for Lydia Halse and George Hubbard. Birthdates and locations were on, but Halse?  Well, knowing how I had screwed up the names, of course, HULTZ and HALSE could easily be mistaken for one another.  And, something else I learned by pulling up the record and not relying on Ancestry's abstraction. Lydia had a maiden name of Phillips.

BINGO.

I still have not made the connection, but this is the type of real research that click and adder's just can't appreciate.


This was edited to change ROBERTSON to ROBINSON as I have recently discovered that ROBINSON was the last name used on the marriage certificate for Mary Matilda.