Mistakes! Oh yes, I’ve made a few (or a lot)
- moughty
- Apr 14
- 4 min read
What is the thing I wish I’d known when I first started my genealogical journey? Cite your sources! I still come upon information in my database and think…where did I get that! Sometimes I can recreate it, but unfortunately, sometimes the information is no longer available. Luckily, I wasn’t too far into my research before I heard Elizabeth Shown Mills at a National Conference and purchased her first book, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian! I still think this is a great basic resource that won’t overwhelm the newbie. It is a 100 page primer on the basics of citation. Of course as I became more proficient I obtained her tome, Evidence Explained, Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace which comes in at a hefty 884 pages. It comes in handy when you discover some unusual resource.
Another early mistake I made which I truly regret, was removing photographs from an old album without first taking a picture of each page to maintain the organization. My father gave me my great grandmother’s photo album dating from the late 19th Century. The cover was made of silk and the pages were wood and it was disintegrating. I had heard about the importance of keeping pictures away from materials that would damage them, so I carefully removed each of the pictures from the album. There was nothing written in the album about the pictures nor on the backs of the pictures to identify them. I scanned them and stored the originals in an acid free box (you can see most of them on my website…let me know if you recognize any of them😀). Actually, the good news is that I have heard from people who could identify some of the pictures. I wrote earlier this year about Mary Hay Sprague Reoch where an unknown DNA match had the same picture. Another person identified a picture of a young boy (the picture was taken in Bridgeport, Connecticut), as her uncle who had died at age 25. She turned out to be a half 4th cousin, descended from the half sister of my 2x great grandmother. My great grandmother (who was the immigrant) had seven brothers and two sisters who survived infancy so I’m confident that some of these pictures are her siblings and/or cousins but haven’t been able to get anyone to identify them. The moral here is that if you do have a photo album, make sure you take a photograph or scan each page so you can maintain the original order. It might provide a hint as to their relationship.
A frequent mistake in Irish research is confusing people of the same name living in the same area. This was a big one for me when I first started my research. The other part of this is not correcting the error. One of the first families I researched was my maternal grandmother’s family, the Moags. Like Moughty, this is an unusual name, both in Ireland and the U.S. but they repeated the same given names over and over again. On one of my early trips to Salt Lake City I found a transcript of records from First Boardmills Presbyterian Church in County Down which listed the fourth and fifth children of John Moag and Mary Petticrew as Stewart Moag (4 Jul 1783) and Margaret Moag (1 Apr 1786). Unfortunately, the records for the church began in 1782 so there were three earlier children with no names. My 2x great grandfather was William Moag, baptized in 1825 and his marriage in 1852 to Mary Rush named his father as John Moag. Great, I’d now attached William to John. I didn’t work on this family for quite a while, and when I got back to it, I re-read everything I had (a good exercise if you’ve been away from a family for a while, or if you’ve come to a brick wall) and realized I’d missed a generation. Had I initially created a timeline, I would have realized that the original John was too old to have had a child in 1825. It appears that Mary Petticrew died prior to 1804 when this original John married a second time Anne Furey and had four additional children. Another John married Margaret McClean in 1814 and was the father of my William. Since I can find no other Moag having children in the 1780s or marrying in the early 1800s my hypothesis is that this John was one of the three children born to John and Mary Petticrew prior to 1782. This is always open to re-evaluation should additional information become available.
There have been many additional mistakes some of which I’ve written about in other blogs. I find that I discover my mistakes by writing a narrative of my family story. It's a great way to put things in chronological order and discover what's missing or doesn't fit.
Good Luck and Happy Hunting!
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