Never ignore childless siblings!

One of my immigrant ancestors had six children between 1795 and 1815, one of whom apparently died young. Two of the six were daughters who married but had no children. Their husbands both left wills.

One husband's will left everything to his wife if she survived him. If she did not, he divided his estate in half -- one half to be divided among his surviving siblings, and the other half to be divided among his wife's siblings . . . He named them all, including the one we thought had died as a baby, with her married name. Both had common names, there was no other way to find her.

When I started reading his will, I thought, well, this is pretty far out on a limb. But in genealogy, "out on a limb" is a wise place to be.

She went to Texas too

I have more Texas relatives than I thought,
but few this early. This book looks like it could be both a page-turner and a fine resource for those researching people -- not just men -- in the early Texas borderlands.






Amy M. Porter, Their Lives, Their Wills: Women in the Borderlands 1750-1846 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2015).

Methodology Monday with Calvin Snell

Most of us have learned how ancestors can be proved -- sometimes have to be proved -- by combining a wide range of documented indirect evidence into a case and writing out the argument, when no document appears stating the relationship in question straight out. But what happens when there is such a direct-evidence document, and the less formal sources all contradict it?

In the March 1995 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Tom Jones documented just such a situation in the case of Calvin Snell of Lake County, Ohio, and concluded that the will was wrong or at best misleading. First he had to establish that there was no evidence of two different Calvin Snells in the area at that time. Then he had to correlate the various kinds of secondary information and indirect evidence that contradicted the will. The tables systematically comparing what different sources said are worth some study.

Those of us who have just worked our way out of the habit of trusting everything we find tend to become "evidence snobs." It's interesting to note that some of the information the author ferrets out and analyzes comes from what looks to be, and is, a fairly low-quality source: sketchy material on the Snell family compiled by an unknown person at an unknown time from unknown sources. The point is that good genealogists don't believe anything without reservation -- even an original signed will -- and they also don't decline to examine anything either. You just have to document its character as well as possible and weigh it in the balance along with all the other clues gathered.

Read the whole thing. This was the first article discussed by the Transitional Genealogists Study Group last year.

Where there's a will there's a story

Brenda Joyce Jerome, CG, at Western Kentucky Genealogy Blog posts the 1874 will of Blount Hodge, which is (literally) a story in itself and, Jerome is pretty sure, "the most interesting one to be found in Livingston County." I've certainly never seen one like it. Hodge comments extensively on his son's character and plotting against him. He had property across the Ohio River in Pope County, Illinois, as well as in Kentucky. Read the whole thing and check out the links.