Do you ever have the situation where the evidence that you have isn't lining up?
It's not, it's not making sense and no matter what you do you can't find
anything new to help you clarify the information that you already have? Well I
have a solution that you might be able to use in your family history research
and that is theories.
Howdy I'm Caleb Lee with Family History Fanatics this is
a YouTube channel where we teach you how to understand your DNA, climb your family
tree, write the stories of your ancestors, and preserve them for the
future. We also like to have a lot of fun with our family history. Oo if you would
like to have fun while you're doing your family history, please consider
subscribing. Today we're going to be talking about my current research thing
that I'm working on. And that is trying to figure out who are the parents of
David J Searcy? He's got two sets of parents and only a few records
linking them to him. And so, I've been having a lot of trouble trying to find
more records to prove and disprove the parentage of David J Searcy. So one of
the things that I've been using in order to help my researches is theories. I
brainstormed a bunch of ideas and then kind of culled the ones that were just too
out there. Like there's no way I was gonna be able to figure it out unless
they just landed in my lap. There was no way, way I was going to be able to
find the records to prove it. But, you know, the most plausible ones that I have
come up with are things like maybe he was adopted from one family. maybe
there's two David J Searcy. But the one I'm gonna focus on today is the one that
I think that has a lot of useful lessons and research. And that is the one that
William B and William are the same person. Now when you start out with
researching new theories the first thing you want to do after making it is
listing the evidence that would be able to prove this. For direct evidence
something that will you know very clearly tell me this is what happened.
I have, if I were to find a marriage record of William to Mary and then a marriage
record of William to Sally then we have our theory of proven. But sometimes the
evidence isn't so direct sometimes we can
have to pick it out from all of the things you've gathered so far. So for
instance if the two Williams have similarities like maybe they were
both from a certain place or both have a certain death date, then maybe they might
be the same people. Or if we have a case where one of the sisters died and then
William got married to the other sister, then maybe that might be a place
where he was married to one sister and then he was married to the other sister.
So this started out with me first looking at William Searcy page, this is
William Searcy that is married to Mary, and I was going through trying to find
any other information besides the fact that he was named William Searcy and
married to Mary and you know father of David, which may not be correct. So that's
from this source. And then the other one thing that's connected to him is this, is
this note and it says, among other things, that William was in the Army during
the Civil War when David J Searcy was 2 years old. There's a little bit of
inconsistency because David J Searcy is born in 1864. And so he would be actually
1866 that he would be in the military if he was when David was 2 years old, but
this is a hint that William might be in the army. I was like, "Great! There's lots
of military records. We could find a lot and get a lot of information about William."
So I went over here, and clicked on the search, and it comes up with 480
results. Now I could, you know, search through all these things trying to find
the military records. Making a listing of them, checking them, figuring out
the correct or not. But there is actually a way to just search
for military records. So you can go down here and you can restrict the records by,
you know. You could research it by location, but in this case, we're gonna do
by type. So you just click on type and then you have a bunch of
different things. And in this case we search for military. So we click on this
and then update and there we go. This is all military records.
These particular military records under their special ones. You see, they've got this
photograph with the box behind it. And this means that they're from a partner
site. In this case. they're from fold3. fold3 is a paid site most of
the documents on there are, you have to pay for in order to get. So I
don't have a subscription to fold3. I don't think anyone in my family has
subscription to fold3. So that means either I'm gonna have to, you know, get a free
weekend like, this guy talked about, in his video or we're going to have to go
to the Family History Library and take advantage of the resources there. I
know that the next page is gonna have stuff about William Searcy, as
opposed to like I don't know Bob Johnson. Because the last record is, you know,
fairly on point. It's William Searcy. The only thing
that's been changing is the middle name. So we go and we see, yeah, this pattern of
middle name is the only thing that's changing for a while and then
later we get to slight changes. So that's how, you know, where you might be able
to find something as opposed to it's gone. Like there's nothing else. That's
useful information. Speaking of useful information, What?
Because Sally is the nickname of Sareth Searcy who's, Sarah Peak I should say,
who's married to William B, we're searching for William Searcy who is
married to Mary Peak. But, you know, let's take a look. Now, there isn't that much
information here. We have the name. We have the other name. We have this, it
is information but it's not evidence, that this is, you know, for in this case,
William B. The only other information that might be able to connect to their
family, you know prove that this is their record, is the fact is this July 14th. I'm
not sure what this is over here. There's ninety. That might be a one over there.
Maybe 1890? And then, this over here is December 6, 1906. Now that date over there
is, it's fairly close to Williams's death date of November 24, 1906. Which
would, you know, make sense. This is a pension file and that would mean it's s
pension given to either him or her, and so, it would start at his death date or
end at his death date. But other than that, there's, you know, not really much
evidence here. So it's perfectly fine to put this, in this case, your
source box on Family Search or maybe it's your shoebox on Ancestry. But it's
perfectly okay to go back and try to find another record that proves
things. Cuz, if we can find another military record, we have evidence that
William B is part of the military and might even find the same
regiment number as the one that, again, was listed on this record. So, we
keep going and on the next page we find, again, Sally Searcy. So here we have, this
is actually a record of Sally, not William, even though it says William
right here. But anyways, this 'died' would be hers (January 23rd, 1926) which we can
see matches perfectly. And, you know, we have the nice, this is when it was
reported. And then going down here, again, William B. Searcy Corporal D-54
Kentucky. The important thing to figure out here is this a record of, you know,
William B and Sally, because that's what this is at this point. We've got a lot of
dates over here and this is probably the amount that she was paid. The earliest
one is 6th of December 1906, and that, isn't that a bit familiar? Isn't it.
Because that is also nearby his death date. So this is a record of William died,
and then it was reported, and the government started sending money to
Sally. It matches up, so this is a record of William. And so I can add that.
And I can also add this, because D-54 Kentucky mounted infantry. So going back
to the clue web, we've we found similarities between the Williams.
Because we have William married to Mary, who is said to have
served in the Civil War and we have William B, who actually served in the
Civil War. They could be related. How do we figure it out? Well, one of the things
we can look at is, did one sister died before the other? Was there a period
where William could been married to Mary and then to Sarah.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna use this Timeline feature. It's really
cool, and so cool in fact that I will be explaining it later in more detail
in a future video. So with Mary, she was born in 1840 and then we don't know when
she died. We have sources of her from 1840 to 1990, nineteen hundred I should say
not 1990, she wasn't that old. Then what I can do is
we're gonna use this timeline feature. So what we're looking for is we're looking
for Sarah so he married her in 1858, which two years before Mary was in
Andrew Peaks house. Mary, at the time, would be eighteen, so just keep that
in mind. Before that, he had another spouse and she died and then
there was a three year gap and then he married Sarah. Now when you have cases
where a guy marries a second wife, one thing that might cause them to marry
earlier, that as opposed to spending more time in grieving, is if he had
children with his first wife. So for instance, he did have two children in
fact one, of them is evidence of Williams great prophetic skill. So he
did have small children who would, you know, need a mother in addition to a
father to care for them. So maybe that would be a factor in
him trying to get married earlier. So maybe? Maybe there was a marriage in this
three year gap? However it doesn't seem right. I mean, he marries Mary for like,
you know, two / three years. Then divorces her. Then marries Sarah and lives with her
happily ever after, until she actually outlived him. So it doesn't seem right
and also it doesn't matter. Because David was born in 1864, as mentioned previously,
which is not in this three year gap. So it's not a case where maybe
he was born so there's some ambiguity there. William might have, like you know,
had extramarital sexual relationships with Mary and thus cause David to come
into the world. But, mmm, again that's that's stretching. That's reaching.
I need a lot of evidence to back that up. It doesn't look like this
theory that William and William B are the same person. Doesn't look like it
would work. While you've seen, yes, there are similarities. but one the timeline
wouldn't work out unless there was adultery in which case it's that's kinda
hard to prove. So unless something new comes along I'm gonna assume this theory
is incorrect. But just because this theory is incorrect that doesn't
mean that theories aren bad. It you know kind of focused my research got me
thinking and looking at the evidence new evidence and old evidence trying to
piece together things that would prove the theory. So I think you should take a
look at theories you know try them out with your problems and if you if you
have success or you have failure or just want to talk a little bit more about how
you can use theories in genealogy then please let us know down in the comments
what your thoughts are what your experiences were. And of course if you liked this
video please give us the thumbs up it really helps us you know tells YouTube
that this content is good and also that we should make more of these videos
because this is what you want so if you want more of these like the video please.