Family Historian User Group

Wondering how others tackle brick walls in FH? No doubt many of us get to a point where we just cannot identify someones' parents.

What do you do?

• Flag it on your to-do list?
  Keep researching?
  Stop!?

Sometimes I find that I can actually look over the brick wall. What I mean is, that there are a number of contenders for parents and they are probably aunts and uncles if not the parent. The next step might identify possible grandparents and maybe I can continue backwards from there.

But how do I record these potential links? If you like, I think of them as a "pool of parents".

Any ideas?

Graham

I deploy the FAN principle. And if that fails I take a brute force approach of tracing all the possible candidates forward and backwards from their earliest record... which does rely on having a lot of time on your hands.

Yes, starting from the pool of potential parents, build a mini-tree for each couple.
Trace children forward, and grandparents backwards, and siblings sideways.
Eventually, it is hopefully possible to eliminate the mini-trees that are unrelated to your brick-wall, until only one is left.
However, sometimes they are all unrelated, so you have to search for more candidate parents.

Otherwise, just waiting for new records to come online (such as happened with the 1939 Register or soon with the 1921 Census), or going to local records offices can discover those missing links.
I eventually resolved a questionable mother-daughter relationship when I uncovered some NHS historical records from a Workhouse where the daughter's son was born, in which she gave her mother as next of kin that matched perfectly.

There are several ways to log the brick-wall:

1. Use the multitude of Note fields but start the descriptive paragraph with a unique private label.
   e.g. [[ Brick-wall: ...descriptive paragraph goes here... ]]
   Then it is easy to write a Query or Plugin to list each Brick-wall: labelled Note paragraph.
2. Use a Named List called Brick-walls to list each Individual with associated descriptive notes.
3. Use one of the To Do custom fact techniques that are regularly discussed in these Forums.
   See how_to:create_work_in_progress_or_research_to_do_lists|> Create Work In Progress or Research To Do Lists.

gsward wrote: Sometimes I find that I can actually look over the brick wall. What I mean is, that there are a number of contenders for parents and they are probably aunts and uncles if not the parent. The next step might identify possible grandparents and maybe I can continue backwards from there.

Yes, sometimes you can be fairly sure of who the grandparents are, without being sure of the intermediate generation. For example you might know your ancestor was called John Smith and you know his approximate date of birth, but there were two John Smiths of similar age in the same village. You might be able to establish, from baptism records, that they were cousins and so had the same 'Smith' grandparents. If your John Smith was married before statutory registration started (1837 in England and Wales) the parish record of his marriage won't tell you his father's name so you don't know which of the cousins he is. (Note that witnesses names might be useful, though). But you can reasonably assume you have the right grandparents.

You could create a 'dummy' child of the grandparents and link your John as a son, recording the reason in a note. However you will then end up with three John Smiths records, when you know there were (probably) only two. Or you could just create a third John Smith record without linking him to any parents, but record the possible identity between him and either of the others in a diagram. I work with diagrams a lot, and save some as Charts in which I have added arrows and question marks or text boxes to remind myself of the possible relationships. This is a personal preference but wouldn't suit everyone's way of working.

One technique I use when I have a "pool" of candidates or when I am not sure about who the parents are is to add a "Possible Parents" Fact to the Person and add the possible couples as Witness parents. This means I can see the information on the Facts tab for both the child and "parents" with a note and I can add sources etc, while being sure my proposal will not end up in an Ancestry tree as fact.

I have also started adding private notes in double square brackets tagged with #TODO and or #RN so I can easily add notes anywhere against individuals or Facts and quickly use the Edit>Find option to get a list of them all and as it's easy to strip private notes on an export I can remove them quickly as well.