Addition by Substraction

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 14-A Brick Wall Revisited

Prompt: Sometimes it takes a set of fresh eyes to solve a problem. Has that happened with you in your genealogy? (Of course, there are other ways to interpret this theme. Any bricklayers in the family?)

I have extended the generations of my family tree out four generations or more in each line with a fair amount of confidence. Because many of my ancestors came to America in the early 1800s or even earlier, records corresponding to them are readily available. When I go back much further, though, I always run into the same problems: lack of contemporary documentation and, therefore, an inability to verify my findings with certainty. Add to that scenario the fact that I’m often dealing with some very common surnames, and you have a recipe for major obstacles.

These are the brick walls that I rarely revisit. I figure, if and when I go there, I am going to do so hand-in-hand with a professional genealogist. I don’t have enough faith in my own findings prior to, say, 1700, especially if I am relying on sources with which I am not familiar—citations from the United Kingdom, usually.

There are, however, a couple of ancestors in my tree–living in the less distant past–whose profiles I return to periodically in hopes of acquiring missing information. For this assignment, I revisited one such ancestor. John Colquitt Montgomery, my 1st cousin 3X removed, was born August 11, 1894, in Wayne, Oklahoma, but no one seems to know where or when he died. He abandoned his wife and four children, supposedly without explanation, and was never heard from again. There are several sources placing him in two different American cities after that. And then? Nothing.

The longer I’ve been doing genealogy research, the more I continue to learn about new resources and search methods. I’m always hopeful that additional expertise I’ve acquired and maybe some newly obtained records will result in my learning what happened to John. I would love to be able to provide answers to his granddaughter who sought my help about this years ago.

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I wish I had a successful “brick wall” revisitation to share. In fact, I had just the opposite happen while trying to come up with a story for this assignment: dutifully re-checking each citation in hopes of extending one line of my tree out further, I actually ended up basically chopping off an entire branch of my tree. Instead of a breakthrough, I’d gone backwards.

I am now fairly certain that I–and a whole lot of other folks on Ancestry.com–probably made a critical error determining the identity of my 2nd great-grandmother’s parents. A citation I recently found calls into question the validity of my (and others’) previous work. My faith shaken, I was compelled to delete not only the individuals I had mistakenly thought were her parents, but all of their children and those children’s spouses and children as well.

And therein lies the problem with inaccurate information in one’s family tree: the original mistake is compounded exponentially with the addition of successive generations.

This frustrating experience had me thinking of a football analogy. Forced to delete so many profiles from my tree sort of felt like I had been tackled, or I’d fumbled or committed a penalty in my own end zone—a “safety.” Not only was I unsuccessful in getting a 1st down, but I lost possession of the ball and handed the opposition 2 points.

I want my tree to be factual. I guess, then, that I have to grudgingly admit that the interception of this previously unseen post necessitating the erasure of hours of work was actually a win. Maybe this new source will ultimately result in a completion, leading to a touchdown.

But right now it just feels like major yardage lost.

“Failure is success in progress.” —Albert Einstein