Boulder Demolition for Genohistorians: Uncovering Ancestral Trails

If you have been doing ancestral research for some time, and taking it seriously, you know the glorious victory of tumbling a brick wall or two. You broke through to a piece of historical or genealogical knowledge that had eluded you. But some of us will eventually find our research path impeded by something bigger and much harder than a brick wall. What do you do when your path is blocked by a landslide of granite boulders ten times your height? The information you need is not just elusive. It’s gone.

I first encountered my granite boulder in my 2nd-great-grandfather David Martin Cox, raised by a poor widow with three older children. She owned too little to leave much of a paper trail. Censuses called her his “mother,” but she had no husband in the household in 1850 or in 1860, when 8-year-old David appears for the first time. She was forty-two when he was born, a bit older than average child-bearing age. Was she his biological mother? My gut said no. They lived in Heard County, Georgia, where the records I need burned in 1893. Most census records that might have answered my questions about who begat whom were in the PIP censuses—pre-1850 and naming only the heads of households. The man of this house was no longer there, leaving only the surname that I inherited, but it might not really be mine. Nor was the widow’s maiden name known. Everyone living in Heard County in 1850 had been there for less than two decades, having won confiscated Creek Indian land in a lottery drawing. Their settlement patterns tell us nothing about families, because land acquisition was the luck of the draw. Many had already moved westward again by 1850, leaving only one or two PIP censuses to mark their time there. This stack of bad luck is truly a boulder.

I took swipes at that stone now and then for decades but did it all wrong. Only in recent years have I learned how to work the cracks. How to blast pieces out by using what information survived to understand more about what didn’t.

Most in my predicament will do one of three things when encountering a boulder:

• Many will go over the top and follow other people’s footprints to a trail on the other side.
• Some will recognize the immense scope and decide that they are not going further. They will pick another family line to work.
• A few, though, were born stubborn and keep coming back to that rock.

With this article, I encourage the stubborn ones to keep blasting through the boulders skillfully. Let’s talk about why, how, and what’s in it for us.

Work It Well or Walk Away

Before I get too deeply into why we must work that stone properly or walk away, let’s talk about why we should only consider these two options. Climbing over the stone and taking the most traveled path on the other side is a terrible risk and responsibility.

Why? On the other side of that stone are multiple paths, some clear-cut and some long covered by nature and neglect. One of those paths leads to the past you seek. Study all paths carefully, of course, but don’t be lured by shiny things. At least one path will have been lit up by a researcher who found a document or two, made a guess, and built a tree on it. The documents prove that a family once took that path, but not that your family did. Check their sources and logic, by all means. But if you are not convinced, there’s still a stone wall in your way. Don’t be tempted to take the dubious path anyway so you can keep building your tree fast. You are most likely building the wrong tree and luring dozens of baby genealogists behind you to their doom . . . citing you as their source.

There is no dishonor in it, if you look at the stone and feel only dread at the idea of giving hours, days, maybe even years over to its demolition. Step aside for the stubborn geek like me who loves weilding a research sledge hammer. If you have knowledge that could help, leave it where it can be found. Check in now and then to see if they’ve made progress that helps you. And go do what you love to do well. There’s always another family line needing attention.

Now, after all I’ve said, are you still standing there, looking at that stone and itching to take a piece out of it? Then you’re one of us. Put on your hard hat, gather your tools, and make every stroke count.

Making Every Stroke Count

I wasted many years coming back to my wall and doing all the wrong things. I popped in every few years, hoping something might have changed. The stone would have grown cold, along with it my memory of what I had already tried. And I would do all the same things over again, with all the same results. The only thing that was changing was the number of people who had jumped the stone and accepted the path I knew to be wrong. I accept some responsibility for that because I never gave them my proof that they had the wrong ancestors.

Over the years, thanks to much education from genealogy pros, the development of tools and skills, and a lot of hard experience, I am starting to see major chunks coming out of my boulder. For those who have been swiping fruitlessly at the same immobile stone for a while, I think I can save you a lot of wasted time. Here’s what I wish I’d known and committed to decades ago.

1. Study the boulder and its surroundings.

If your ancestors’ records have not survived or never existed, you must find your people in their surroundings. You must chip away at what doesn’t fit them to narrow down what might. You need to know their town, county, district, stretch of the river, church, laws, and way of life. It’s hard work, yes. But it’s glorious work as the place starts to come to life.

For years I scanned two books repeatedly as one of many “swipes” at the stone. The books had vital clues, if I had only looked closer and asked better questions. I only scanned for my ancestors’ names and missed what else these books could tell me. One was Lynda Eller’s Heard County, Ga.: A History of Its People (1980) and the other was Martha Lou Houston’s Reprint of Official Register of Land Lottery of Georgia, 1827 (1928). Only when I formed a very specific question, put fragments of things from each book together, and pondered and rearranged them, did I see a vital clue I had missed repeatedly regarding the probable husband of the widow Elizabeth Cox. I don’t yet have the incontrovertible proof, but I have the best theory going—the only theory really worth considering—and lot to back it up. And I’m still chiseling around it, getting closer to proof.

Become a scholar of your boulder. Know it better than anyone else. It will give up clues.

2. Pencil a plan always.

I use the word “pencil” metaphorically, of course. Anyone who has been following this work for a while knows I am an e-person. It’s all digital. All my work is with me all the time. Whatever your preferred method, though, put it in writing! Plan!

Research plans are the key to collapsing years of fruitless work into days of productivity. You have to know what you’re looking for and where you plan to look. You want to start with a clear idea of what you already know. Then, look for the “low-hanging fruit” among the things you don’t yet know. What vines can you clear from your boulder with minimal effort to reveal the best cracks in the stone? And as you find the cracks you modify the plan.

In my situation—a burned county—I need to see what state and federal records can tell me. I need to see what I can find from neighboring counties. Census records tell me who the neighbors were and who was coming and going. The state lottery records tell me what county each lottery winner lived in when they won their piece of the Creek land. Work the clues.

If you are on my mailing list, you probably received a free copy of one of my Research Plans. Use something like this to guide your work. Or if you are using Zotero (highly recommended), you can use a plug-in called Better Notes to create a template and store your research notes where they can always be found again.

3. Work in manageable chunks.

That boulder is intimidating as a whole. It’s immobile in bulk. You must break it into pieces. Find the chunks you can manage in the time you have now. Feel and celebrate the tiny victories as each manageable chunk yields its knowledge. You’ll want to be smart about which chunks you work first. Eventually, you’ll have weakened the mammoth rock and it will start to break in on itself. Again, here, use the research plan to pick the chunks that have the most hope of weakening the stone.

4. Keep meticulous notes.

This stone isn’t coming down overnight. It could be your life’s work. You will have to leave it many times to do other things. Be sure that you know exactly where you left off when you return. Your research plans are the best way to keep up with what you have done and what you need to do. Also, carefully document the logic behind the suppositions and facts you draw from your work.

Your research plans become the spine of your research, linking out to all evidence and tying together your logic. This material will become your backup when any statement of your research is challenged. And as you post material on Ancestry or other online venues, the more documentation you offer, the better the chance that newer researchers will borrow your facts and not just ill-conceived guesses by a researcher moving too fast.

5. Use “dynamite” skillfully to make major breaks.

Breaking through granite boulders takes some powerful force at times. The first dynamite I applied to my Heard County boulder was DNA testing. It will often be the most important break you can make in boulder cases, bringing answers and new questions—ruling things out and making new things possible.

My uncle’s y-DNA pinpointed the likely household of the man who fathered David Martin Cox. As my gut told me, he almost certainly wasn’t a Cox. He was most probably a Winchester. We can’t be sure which of the Winchester men (several properties over) was my 3rd-great-grandfather, though we have a strong idea about it. Autosomal DNA has also demonstrated that the widow Elizabeth Cox who raised David was not biologically kin to him. DNA should be applied early to just about any boulder blasting plan. It also needs to be checked regularly, because the evidence can take new turns as new DNA donors are matched. You must get some good training in analyzing DNA results to solve problems. Important clues can slip by unnoticed otherwise.

David’s death certificate eventually turned up in the Georgia archives and listed a mother named Julia Anderson. Father unknown. I am now working with a much more difficult sort of dynamite. Anderson turns out to be a name more common than Smith in 1850s Georgia, I am researching 105 people in 27 households in seven contiguous counties. Not one has the name Julia, among those named. But they will, one by one, lead me closer to knowing if she lived in the area. And, this dynamite project is helping me (and thousands of descendants of the Georgia Andersons) to put together the family relationships between these households. The vitally important thing with a step like this is to do it thoroughly once and document it well because no one will ever want to do this twice. But a lot of people will be helped with their boulders because I did it once.

6. Don’t let the stone get cold between visits.

Nothing is more important to breaking granite boulders than your analytical skills. The fresher the data is in your mind, the more likely you are to recall a connection that will lead to breaks.

Don’t get me wrong. I encourage you to do other projects in tandem with your demolition work—for your sanity. You deserve to have some easier victories while you put forth this Herculean effort. You will want to stay fresh on the everyday work of genohistory. You need to see productivity. Just don’t let the granite be too long without attention from you.

Maybe demolition is your Saturday morning work or Sunday night. Maybe you do it a week each month. Stay fresh but keep coming back before your memory is gone.

7. Make your knowledge findable.

Skilled genohistorical demolition experts are rather rare. If you’re built for this type of work, the world needs what you can produce. Ensure those on the path behind you can find the evidence you’re amassing. Rather than repeating your work, they can learn from you and work another stone. Or if this boulder turns out to be more than a lifetime’s worth of work, they can pick up where you left off.

You will also need to document educated speculations, to get the brainwork of others assisting you. Putting your hard-earned speculations (carefully marked as speculations) in your online trees will also give pause to those who would otherwise follow the badly documented paths to quick tree building. Sure, some will quickly take your speculation as truth, borrow it as such, and cite you as their source or claim it as their own find. But they’d have done it anyway with unresearched data by another researcher.

What is in it for you?

Demolishing boulders is substantial work that might not bring you the answers you hope to get. But it will bring rewards so worth the effort:

• You’ll become a master boulder blaster, and our field needs this expertise.
• You will know your ancestors’ world better than anyone.
• Every piece of rock you release from that boulder gives someone else an answer.
• You will discourage new generations of researchers from jumping the boulder and running up the wrong path to the wrong ancestors.
• You might get all your questions answered. But if you don’t, you will at least know, after a reasonably exhaustive search, when the answers cannot be found.

Call to Action

Do you have a granite boulder in your path? If boulder demo is not for you, there is no dishonor is stopping a family line there and moving on to what you do best. If you are a person who has to tackle the boulder, I look forward to mastering this skill with you.

My #1 call to action is to any who jumped a boulder and took the easy path, building a tree on top of questionable information. I’ve done it and some of it is still findable. Let’s return to any boulder we jumped and hide that branch until we’ve got proof. We know more now than we did when we made that leap, right? Maybe we’re ready to bust that boulder. Maybe not. But this way, we do no more harm to those who might take our bad genealogy as “evidence.”

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