Learning from the January NYGBR

How do you prove that your great-great-great grandparents were NOT married? How do you deal with a great stroke of genealogical luck? We don't always have to figure these things out for ourselves.

Two articles in the January 2013 New York Genealogical and Biographical Record show how top genealogists dealt with these questions. In both cases they involve nineteenth-century immigrants to New York City and nearby. These folks are not ancestors for most of us, but the research problems presented can happen anywhere.

Melissa A. Johnson correlated indirect evidence with a goodly number of negative search results to reach the conclusion that one of her ancestral couples, surnames Morgan and Geldart, did not marry.

And Donn Devine, CG, who by good fortune received some nifty evidence on the German origins of George Falk (1823-1900), considered whether the Genealogical Proof Standard required an additional search in this particular case.

For those of us who can't attend national conferences or institutes, publications like NYGBR are a relatively inexpensive form of education.




Harold Henderson, "Learning from the January NYGBR" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]