Roots and Shoots

Mar 31, 2024 | Family Tree

A lot has changed since my first attempts at figuring out our family history in the 1990s; returning to it, I find the two biggest changes are the quantity of primary material now available online and the emergence of genealogy DNA products. Gone are the days of ordering copies of microfiche and trying to find a machine to read them with, or looking up microfiche in libraries, or engaging researchers for what are now the most basic of lookups. (No criticism of researchers and professional genealogists, by the way, just that their role is now more specialist.)

I’ll leave genealogical DNA testing for another post: today I want to reflect on online research.

The availability of records online is a very good thing, notwithstanding the commercial gatekeeping that attaches to it. It has also raised its own problems. Sites like Ancestry and Familysearch allow one both to research and to upload one’s own family tree and this is unquestionably valuable, but also problematic.

Back in the day, it was a known issue that the International Genealogical Index was an important resource but the associated pedigrees were often names and records jigsawed together and glued up with wishful thinking. The same is true with Ancestry and the like: I’ve found a lot of family trees there recently which do not accord with my reading of the surviving records. Usually, this has been because the researcher has looked at headline indices but not taken the time to dig deeper into the primary sources, for example by not reading through a register of baptisms where it has been scanned. It is a habit that has stayed with me since university days – always read the primary sources.

That isn’t to say, of course, that my reading of the records is better, just that one has to be careful and thoughtful in drawing conclusions where records are scant or ambiguous. There’s an old story about a sociologist, a mathematician and a logician who are travelling to Scotland. Just across the border, they notice a black sheep on a hillside. ‘Look,’ says the sociologist. ‘Scottish sheep are black.’ ‘Oh no, no, no,’ replies the mathematician. ‘All you can justifiably say is that there is one black sheep in Scotland.’ ‘You’re both wrong,’ says the logician. ‘The true observation is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland which has at least one black side.’

I tend towards the logician in my reading of official records, albeit that there are times when you have to make a judgement on whether something is a reasonable (provisional) conclusion notwithstanding apparent errors – our ancestors were quite capable of telling outright untruths or partial truths to census enumerators, for example, and census enumerators made mistakes. Wherever possible I’m looking for corroboration of some kind. That’s a counsel of perfection, of course, but it’s a good operating principle.

There is also something strange about the search experience of the ‘big three’ sites here in the UK – Ancestry, Find My Past and Family Search: sometimes very small changes in search parameters make very large differences in outcomes – often the difference between finding something and not finding it. Several times I’ve been unable to find records again that I know exist because I’ve already looked at them and jotted down details I want to revisit and confirm. As a user who has had some experience with implementing IT in my work life, that suggests to me that there are problems with the databases, the data schemas or the search algorithms (or all three). Databases of names are much more complex than generally understood, and that is compounded when one is researching a time before spellings became homogenised and when names were recorded phonetically by curates who were unfamiliar with dialect (and changed with the installation of a new curate). Even allowing for that, however, something is off with those sites.

On the plus side, something that hasn’t changed is the kindness and willingness of other people to help where they have expertise to offer. Message boards and Facebook are really good for networking with other researchers and getting pointers to things one has missed or of which one was unaware. In fact, as someone who is deeply sceptical about Facebook, my experience of genealogical interest groups to date has been so positive that it has become my primary use case for the site.

Also just as relevant after all these years is the unsettling oddity of recording a life by reference to formal records without any personal context. What were my ancestors doing between censuses? Did they make the best that they could of their lives or did they experience them as oppressively shitty? Did they have good lives? Most of the time we will never know, but attempting to find answers to these in the absence, usually, of written records such as diaries, is the difference between compiling a family tree and creating a family history, and I’m here for the latter in the long run.