How I learned what to do with undocumented family trees

Back in the 20th century, my wife's father's mother's family spent a lot of time (and some money on a professional genealogist in North Carolina) trying to find the ancestors of her great-great grandmother Jennie (Cochran) Boren.

They got nowhere; my daughter and I got nowhere too -- until she came across a family tree on Rootsweb's WorldConnect pages, a more static predecessor of today's Ancestry trees. The tree contained names and dates -- no sources. But it approached Jennie from the "other side," that is, her birth family.

Did we sneer at this tree -- unsourced as it was, and connected to an address whose owner never responded to our inquiries? We did not.

But we didn't believe it and take its statements as gospel, either -- we had been around long enough not to do that either.

We did the same as reasonable people do with family stories they heard in person -- checked the claims out against the available records. Was Jennie found in census records with her claimed parents? Were they the ages claimed? What about the siblings and aunts and uncles? Could we find quality sources, information, and evidence that confirmed or denied the claims in the tree?

We did. There's more work to be done on this line but without this rather disreputable-seeming lead, we might still be looking for Jennie (AKA Jane E.).

Wise genealogists use all available clues. Dogmatic rejection of apparently low-quality sources is no more sensible than dogmatic acceptance of them. Don't be a source snob.


Harold Henderson, "How I learned what to do with undocumented family trees," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Sunday with NGSQ: A Boren Family in Pittsburgh

Samuel W. Boren's 1898 Pittsburgh death certificate said that he was 69 and that his parents were both named Boren. Ten years later his grandson wrote down a more informative, brief, and entirely unsourced profile of Samuel's birth family. In the June issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, I treated it as a hypothesis and managed to confirm it, relying on indirect evidence and evidence from better-documented siblings.

Key records were censuses, city directories, Methodist newspapers and records, tax lists, property records, and vital records (in a state other than Pennsylvania). Key tools included establishing a migration chronology (mostly in and around Pittsburgh), creating tables to condense and correlate multiple pieces of evidence, and establishing connections between Samuel, each of his two brothers, and their sisters.

Of course, the conclusion that Samuel's parents were John Boren and Elizabeth Moore just sets up two more tricky parentage problems in early 19th-century "Dark Age" western Pennsylvania genealogy.

Like many articles, this one has had multiple incarnations. It is the more finished version of a case presented to half of the January 2014 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy Advanced Evidence Practicum. And it will be one of several proof arguments to be dissected in the January 2015 SLIG course "From Confusion to Conclusion." Samuel was or is my great-great-great grandfather-in-law.



Harold Henderson, "Testing Family Lore to Determine the Parentage of Samuel W. Boren of Pittsburgh," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 97-110.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Sunday with NGSQ: A Boren Family in Pittsburgh," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 July 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Cite Your Low-Rent Sources!

Sometimes as genealogists we have trouble distinguishing between our grubbies and our Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.

Source citations tell our readers what our evidence is. When the work is finished and meant to prove our conclusion, the sources will usually be original records. But when the research is in progress, our best evidence may not be very good. (And some books and articles may simply be created in order to systematize the pile of records and notes found in grandma's attic, and make them accessible, not to prove anything.) They're really more leads to follow up on.

Failing to distinguish these two uses of citations may be a cause of "source snobbery," a disorder in which genealogists (your blogger included) sometimes refrain from perusing Ancestry trees for fear of polluting our minds or our databases. (Of course taking those trees as gospel is an even more widespread disorder among newbies, but we're not worrying about that here.)

Sometimes we need to be polluted in order to become successful -- much as a cop might need a drunken snitch's whisper to get started on a trail, even though it wouldn't count for anything when the case came to court.

My wife's ultra-mysterious great-great grandmother Jennie (Cochran) Boren was born in North Carolina and died in Pittsburgh, but her maiden name was so common we never had any luck finding her in her parents' household. The break we received was not due to our diligence. Somebody who didn't answer emails posted an unsourced tree of Jennie's family from the North Carolina Cochran side, and from that lead we were able to amass plenty of evidence proving the long-lost connection.

Leads document our chase, and later on higher-quality sources document our case, helping us convince our skeptical peers. Don't confuse the two.


Harold Henderson, "Cite Your Low-Rent Sources!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Reviewing Research from 2002

In 2002 my wife and I made a memorable joint research trip to Pittsburgh in quest of certain of her paternal grandmother's Boren ancestors. We got acquainted with the Historic Pittsburgh web site, the Carnegie library, the Beaver County Genealogy and History Center, and a motel lobby full of bikers. I wrote up a 40-page booklet about the project (minus the bikers) for family members.

How does it look now? Well, the citations are nonstandard, but at least they're there, as are images of original records. I used a variety of records but didn't always suck all the juice out of them. (And this is a problem that requires that.) Judging from what I found in my old files, I also spent a lot of time printing out census images and retrieving unsourced trees from the web. (They may yet come in handy.) So there's some work to re-do, not too much to undo, and a lot more sources to seek out.

The main problem I see now in that booklet is its logic. I wasn't sure where to start. My wife's great-grandfather's grandfather is the last well-documented ancestor, so (as I know now) that would have been the best place to start work. But there is a fairly plausible candidate for HIS grandfather who made a detailed deposition for a Revolutionary War pension in 1839. It was just too tempting, so I tried to work from both ends. Go thou and do not do likewise!

We still don't know if he's for real (he never got the pension, as his service records were not found), and in the meanwhile I have learned that it's not good practice to skip over that intervening generation. Also in the meanwhile more compiled abstracts have been published, more original records are on line, and I have gotten acquainted with a number of knowledgeable genealogists in the left-hand end of the state. Pittsburgh is in our sights once again.


Harold Henderson, "Reviewing Research from 2002," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Find your Midwesterners in Pittsburgh

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for pointing out a very interesting subset of genealogically valuable material within the historical gold mine that is Historic Pittsburgh: 125 city directories 1815-1945.

As city directory digitizations go, this is a wonderfully well designed site. Let me count the ways:

* it includes actual images of directory pages, as opposed to error-prone transcriptions.

* it offers a long run of consecutive years, which is required for good research, given that directories often missed people in any given year.

* it keeps pages in their actual sequence, rather than mechanically rearranging them in numerical "order," or even conflating different directories of the same year, as Footnote sometimes unfortunately does.

* it allows searches of ancillary matter such as addresses -- making it possible to find extra residents at a given address, even if the city was too large to have had a criss-cross directory organized by address. So this new format is far more than a mere convenience and travel-saver; it is a powerful research tool.

Right now I'm recalling the long afternoons I spent cranking microfilm following my wife's Boren ancestors in the Pittsburgh directories. They were hard-working but not well off, and they moved every year. Happy New Year, and use this fine resource in good health!