Tracing Families Forward

Often we run into brick walls and can’t determine who an ancestor’s parents are.  Unfortunately, this all too frequently happens with women when no record of a maiden name was kept and the period of her life precedes the strong keeping of vital records.

Don’t hesitate to trace each child of the family forward.  Information from one of the descendants may provide the key to the missing ancestor's identity.

Occasionally, in early American naming practices, the oldest son typically was given the paternal grandfather’s first name, the second son the maternal grandfather and the third son the father’s first name.  In the event that you find two likely candidates to be the parents of an ancestor, review the sons’ names and begin your focus with the ancestor similarly named.  I find many imperfect examples of this in my family history:  Johan Leonard’s son Peter named his oldest son John and his second son George.  George may be the first name of his wife’s mother—but I don’t know, that is one of my brickwalls.

Sometimes when tracing a family in the census, we find all the family parents and their married children living in the same general locale in one census, for example the 1850, but by 1860 some of those married children appear to have moved away.  Search the 1860 census for those names in other states.  Families often migrated in similar patterns or as church groups.  In western Pennsylvania there were large congregations of Church’s of the Brethren in the early 1800s through the 1850s.  As their posterity grew, the land in the area did not, so groups migrated in tandem to various western states, like Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, where land was available for settling.

Sometimes when tracing forward various families in the census, one will find an aged parent or grandparent living with descendants, which helps to tie generations together.