The discussion group of the Great Lakes APG chapter recently took up an article by Elizabeth Shown Mills published in the July/October 1997 Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue of The American Genealogist: "Deliberate Fraud and Mangled Evidence: The Search for the Fictional Family of Anne Marie Philippe of Natchitoches, Louisiana." (If you haven't heard Mills speak and are a Midwesterner, don't even try to pronounce that place name.)
The article is worth digging out of your nearest good genealogy library even if you don't have research targets in the 1700s in that territory, because it's at least a three-in-one. (Copies are still available for $20 from the TAG website.)
For one thing, it shows show even the best genealogical research has a kind of spiral character, in which you examine a set of records, then another, and then later return to the first set knowing enough more to see the same records with new eyes. For another, it ties the genealogical puzzle into the story of a chilling fragment of German history. (No spoilers here!) For a third, it chronicles a bit of the author's own journey from neophyte to sadder but wiser.
And finally, read it for the inspiration. At one stage in the research, essential information from parish registers was finally being made available -- but only in a compilation of poorly indexed abstracts, the originals remaining unavailable. Mills writes,
At this point persistent researchers part company from the fainthearted. Solving this research problem required a word-for-word, page-by-page reading of the entire volume -- indeed more than one such reading, to absorb all clues amid a myriad of name variations and phonetic spellings. {358}Will you recognize that point when you come to it?
