Because I’ve noticed a commonality among newer genealogists that I meet, today’s post is geared towards beginners.
So, what is the common denominator among these newbie researchers? When I ask about family research, the reply is almost invariably – “I only research my direct line. The others aren’t my family!”
Maintaining that point of view is guaranteed to miss out on many valuable clues to be found.
Here’s why:
- Our ancestors didn’t live in a vacuum. Their FAN club (Friends, Associates, neighbors) interacted with them daily. They often intermarried!
- Who lived with the family and why? Were they workers or extended family? Perhaps even family-to-be.
- Did more than one person follow the same trade or occupation?
- Learn about the family’s life circumstances. For example, what was the family mortality rate? Did children survive to adulthood or die young?
- Was the opportunity present for an education?
- Did the family move from one location to another? Did they move en masse or did one or two members migrate elsewhere together?
- Are you missing parents’ names or a woman’s maiden name? This is a frequently occurring brick wall that might easily be solved by researching siblings.
- The same holds true for identifying parental birth places.
- Even more importantly, if yours was an immigrant family and the ancestral home is unknown, fully researching your ancestor’s siblings might be the key to discovery.
- Flesh out collateral family members. Other researchers/distant cousins might have information or photos not available to you.
- Find living distant cousins and collaborate in your research.
- Is your family’s health history important to you? Collateral research will help identify common causes of death in the family.
- Given names are often repeated in families. Use collateral research to sort out all those William Smith cousins.
- Collateral research will help identify those DNA matches. Without it, you are destined to have many distant cousins, but no knowledge about how they are related.
- Last, but not least – Don’t overlook unmarried adults in the family. They might not have descendants today, but may have had an important part in the life of his/her family.
Now, start researching those collateral family members!
Collateral lines have led me to so many breakthroughs in my research…I can’t imagine NOT researching them…
Your points above should hopefully convince direct line researchers to venture beyond to those other areas of their tree 😊
A superb post! Agree with you: collateral lines can hold the key to solving some serious genealogy mysteries. I’ve had incredible breakthroughs by researching sideways.
When I was a beginner I had the same thought. I thought researching a whole family was overwhelming. Many of my ancestors had 12-14 children. As I continued my research I realized the importance of researching everyone. I have found parental information by researching siblings. Let’s hope beginning researchers today come to see the importance of this research. Great blog post, Linda.