This isn’t something that I’ve just recently noticed, but it has become ever more apparent as I’ve trudged through my family tree, cleaning up source citations.

Some genealogists have shared how similar the branches of the family tree are, sometimes through endogamy, other times just because both sides of the family lived in close locations for many decades, if not centuries.

My paternal and maternal branches of the tree have nothing like that – they have absolutely nothing in common until my parents met and married.

Because I started researching on the late 1970s, long before the internet age, it also meant tackling records in two different ways.

First, my father’s side of the family tree is almost 100% Carpatho-Rusyn and they immigrated to the U.S. from villages near today’s Presov, Slovakia. Although my grandparents were both born in America, my grandmother’s family returned to Europe when Nana was five years old. She came back to New Jersey permanently when she was 17.

Add to that the fact that my great grandfather changed the family name from Kucharik to Sabo in the early 1900s., those early censuses didn’t help much, nor were there family history books to pull of library shelves.

Oh, and I didn’t even know the family name was Kucharik until the 1980s and the census indexed the name as Ruharik, so I couldn’t find for ages even when I knew about it.

So, how did I learn about this side of my family? Well, many of the “old timers” were still around and Nana had names and addresses. I asked Nana a lot of questions and wrote to her cousins around America, contacted local churches and begged for records and did the same with cemeteries. Little by little, I pieced together the family who lived Stateside.

Then, my dad’s cousin and I split a $200+ bill from the Czechoslovakian Embassy, who had a pile of records found in the archives.

What else is different about my paternal tree? Church records in the villages only go back to the late 1820s. Therefore, aside from adding new distant cousins I find to later generations, there are no more resources to search and that side of my tree will never be extended back any further than 3X great grands and three names of 4X great grands.

My Rusyn family were literally serfs before 1850 and had no opportunity for education or bettering their lives until the Industrial Revolution tapped them in the 1890s.

In summary, my father’s family tree happened through slow, local and personalized research and one giant step to the Czechoslovak archives that cost a pretty penny and took 18 months for a reply.

Now, my mother’s side of the tree was a completely different experience because, for the most part, my maternal grandparents were descended from colonial New England families. Yes, I had some Loyalists thrown in the mix, plus one Danish great grandmother and a 5X great grandfather from the Netherlands, but my research experience was completely different.

I still asked my grandmother questions and I had my grandfather’s cousin, Charles, mentoring me along the way, but, often, I used the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s book loan program by U.S. mail and found generations of family members in huge batches.

I also spent hours in the Pomona Public Library, the Los Angeles Public Library and the Los Angeles Family History Center whenever I could get to them. I absolutely loved the NEHGS journal The Register because so many articles had been published about my ancestors.

After 46 years of researching, the maternal branches of the family tree extend as far back as 15 generations, thanks to a few ancestors living in the 1300s and 1400s who left wills and probates that allowed professional researchers to piece together those families and share their findings.

Overall, I think I’m a perfect example of the American “melting pot.”

What about your tree? Do you have overlapping families, completely separate lines like mine or is your tree somewhere in a the middle with just a touch of common ancestors?

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when I look back at recently completed “deep dive” projects, but I have to admit that I always am.

This project started out as a task to write a lengthy and detailed ancestor life sketch about George Rogers Tarbox, my 3X great grandfather.

I quickly realized that it had been quite a long time since I had delved into George’s life and, more suprisingly, I had never written about his parents and many siblings.

To all those who say they “finished” research on a particular ancestor, family or even their entire family tree, I have to disagree because as active researchers know the work is NEVER finished.

For my William Tarbox family, I was exceedingly fortunate that the early New Gloucester town clerks carefully kept birth records from the town’s earliest settlement.

Marriage records were spotty in 1700s and early 1800s Maine, as were death records.

However, in the decades that have passed since I first looked at the family, more records have become available online. Others have researched individual members of the family, adding still more details to their lives.

Resources like city directories, church histories and town/county histories have provided even more fodder for the rabbit hole.

From this deep dive, I was able to fill out the details of all the lives of George’s siblings and his many nieces and nephews. I discovered how many of his siblings have no descendants today, too, which was a real surprise.

As for George’s life, I knew he lived in Lowell, Massachusetts for a short time and married his second wife in Nashua, New Hampshire, but I could never figure out how a Maine and Massachusetts guy met a New Hampshire lady and married there.

Thanks to those city directories and their fun details, I learned about George’s early business interests in textile manufacturing and, from that, learned that those business interests are what led him from Maine to Lowell to Nashua and then to Newburyport, Massachusetts and, finally, to a new business interest – quarrying granite – in Calais, Maine.

I highly recommend taking deep dives into the lives of somewhat neglected ancestors. You might be surprised at all the new information to be found!

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:

1. Our ancestors didn’t live in a vacuum. Their FAN club (Friends, Associates, neighbors) interacted with them daily. They often intermarried!
2. Who lived with the family and why? Were they workers or extended family? Perhaps even family-to-be.
3. Did more than one person follow the same trade or occupation?
4. Learn about the family’s life circumstances. For example, what was the family mortality rate? Did children survive to adulthood or die young?
5. Was the opportunity present for an education?
6. Did the family move from one location to another? Did they move en masse or did one or two members migrate elsewhere together?
7. 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.
8. The same holds true for identifying parental birth places.
9. 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.
10. Flesh out collateral family members. Other researchers/distant cousins might have information or photos not available to you.
11. Find living distant cousins and collaborate in your research.
12. Is your family’s health history important to you? Collateral research will help identify common causes of death in the family.
13. Given names are often repeated in families. Use collateral research to sort out all those William Smith cousins.
14. 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.
15. 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!