as we do genealogy we run into a number of pitfalls or genealogy mistakes if you are a
beginning genealogist or further down the family history road might i recommend that you don't make
some of these common genealogy mistakes so how can we avoid some of the common genealogy mistakes
that newbies intermediates and sometimes experienced genealogists make well let's
talk about seven of those now and in the comments make sure you tell me have you made any of these
mistakes and how you learn to avoid them so the first one is jumping to conclusions so jumping to
conclusions involves when you do research and you type in a name let's say chester ward born in 1818
in new york and you type that into a search engine or you find them in original records and you think
chester ward born 1818 new york this has to be my ancestor right there are a lot of chester wards
born in 1818 in new york you need to know a little bit more about that chester ward to make sure
that you get the right ancestor otherwise you're gonna fall into the trap that a number of people
find themselves in of merging two people with the same name so always try to dive
deeper try to figure out who was chester's parents who were his spouses one or more what were the his
children's names what was his occupation um where did he travel where did he live
all of these identifying features can help you to know when you find a record if it's about your
chester or not the next mistake failing to read the whole record and this can happen to the best
of us for decades my family didn't know how to get the name of the father of leon phillip smith
yeah smith smith is such a common name so how would we ever figure out who phillip
smith's parents were well if we fail to read the whole record we're going to make the next
mistake you see this is a marriage certificate and it looks innocently like it is the entire
record and for 30 years researchers didn't realize that there were some overlays there
were some side notes on the facing page for the marriage record so a tip to avoid
making these failure to read the whole record mistakes is to always look at the page before
the page after maybe the facing page the backside page because what we found
was right there on that record for generations with the name of leon phillips father
david smith and all we needed to do was look at the entire record the next mistake is failing
to research siblings far too often genealogists will research just straight up their family tree
but if you did this you're going to miss out on details that help you
cross the proverbial ponds find the crack in the brick wall that you need and in this case
i was researching the pewsaker family and if all i did was look for caroline pusaker
and i find her siblings in the census records and find her parents name and call it quits
i never would have found this one important detail had i not stopped to research her brother ludwig
well on his gravestone it's hard to read which is why i brought it out
it said that he was born in ghillersheim hanover oh my goodness so when i went
back to this family tree i was able to find out where everybody was born more than just germany
here over in the american records i was able to figure out hey carl friedrich and her mother were
married in gillersheim i didn't really know that before um i was able to not only put this family
back in gillersheim i noticed that there were some of their neighbors in franklin county ohio
who are also from dillershine they traveled on the same ship they appear in those gillershine records
and now i realize they are actually not only kinsmen i mean townsmen they're kinsmen they're
related i can't tell you how important it is to go and research the siblings because when you do
chances are you're gonna pick up these other brick wall busting details that you're overlooking
now let's talk about handling maiden names and we actually have two videos that you're going to
want to check at the link in the description for for a comedic look on how to deal with surnames
and you're also going to see another one where caleb tells you please stop doing
this in the family trees what are these this well the first one is using the maiden name
m-n-u m-n-u is not a maiden name and in the past when we were doing paper
records and we're sharing records with people we tended to put m n u for maiden name unknown
but that's not this person's native name and the reason why you don't need to do this in online
genealogy and digital genealogy anymore just leave the field blank because then you don't
complicate the search engines with this last name that doesn't apply to your ancestor leave
it blank leave it blank now the other thing people tend to do is use the last name
it's almost as bad as maiden name unknown mnu leave it blank if it's blank other researchers
know that it's blank and you haven't figured that information out it's okay to have a blank in your
tree please please don't do that because one of the other mistakes people do with maiden names is
use married names in the place of maiden names and i want to make this a little bit bigger so that
you can see so here we have leon phillip smith again and his wife's name is mary elizabeth smith
well it just so happens that smith married a smith how's that for complicating things and
mary smith is the daughter of daniel smith and leon smith is the son of david smith
yeah it gets extremely complicated but it happens people with the same last name marry each other
but if you put the married name let's say her last name was mary elizabeth browning but you
put her last name smith in the surname field then people will be looking for mary elizabeth smith
and confuse her with the one who is the daughter of daniel instead of looking for mary elizabeth
smith the daughter of robert browning so when you have a maiden name leave the field blank
if you don't know what her name is and if she married don't put her maiden name in that field
now this may change if you are working with foreign cultures cultures that are not u.s or
british centric where you do have the father and the mother's name such as hernandez espanola you
can put both of those names in there because that is her father's name and that is her mother's name
and you put hernandez espinosa in there that is fine but when she's married you don't tack on her
married name of ortega yet just leave hernandez espinosa if you have any questions or comments
make sure that you put them in the description below and it's okay to disagree with me this is
a place where we can have these discussions but please do your best to let people know what the
real last name of your ancestors are and if you don't know what it is leave it blank now it is
okay to have multiple trees when you're doing a theory maybe you have your main tree and you
have a theory tree that's okay maybe like i do i have a tree for the people i most want to research
or i have my uncle bob's tree he i like to play with uncle bob because he has a challenging
tree it passes through new york and new york has a lot of privacy restrictions on their records
so i like to have history sept separate i also have some other project trees some god parents
that aren't exactly relatives so you might have these little project trees and that's not
what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is uploading new versions of your family tree
to my heritage to ancestry to find my past and not deleting the old versions of your tree
what that does is especially if you make all of these versions publix is that you make clutter on
the platform you damage and frustrate the using or experience for others on the tree what is
what am i talking about well i will use genealogy programs such as ancestry myheritage and they will
give me hints about other users trees well then it will turn out the same person has 15 copies
of robert clayball 15. and i have no idea how to determine if they're doing quality research
or not because i don't know which version is the most updated it's clutter it causes frustration
it wastes resources for that company and i don't want to talk to you can you imagine
the collaborative nature of genealogy that we are not going to be able to continue
if we continually have multiple copies of the same person over and over and over in all these trees
so it is okay to have multiple copies of trees but please delete your old versions and only
work with the freshest one on your computer and online now this is a common mistake in beginning
genealogy and that is not researching all of your lines typically when i run into this people are
either researching their father's father's father's father's father's line or their
mother's mother's mother's mothers mothers line or sometimes sometimes their mother's father's
father's father's father's father's line but do you see this fan chart the person in the center
is you pretend it's you you may not be bart and eugene lee but the person in the center
has all of these family lines that you can choose from and some of you have challenging trees maybe
you're in america and have been here for several generations and your ancestors
are from poland and you don't read polish and polish is a very challenging place to research
because of all the boundary changes in the political upheaval and where are the records
so if you're trying to find your polish ancestors that up your dad's dad's dad dad zine
you're going to get frustrated you're going to quit because you don't take the time to look
at the other people on the family tree that can help you build your skills into genealogists so
that when you know how to read polish and you can access polish records you can have more success
so please don't make this mistake and only focus on when you're lying when you hit a
brick wall instead of not doing anything for the next 20 years go work on another branch spelling
if i've heard it once i've heard it a thousand times and i love you people so
much this is why i'm going to tell you don't make this mistake and the mistake is to assume
that spelling was consistent the further back you go in your family tree it is okay
if sometimes eliza is spelled s e-l-i-s-a and sometimes it's spelled e l i z a that's okay
keep both versions which one do you put in the name field is going to be a matter of debate and
we have it a lot of times here on the channel and yes we can talk about that in the comment section
you might picking up on the thought that we can talk in the comment section absolutely
so don't get hung up that your name is always spelled this way i made this mistake early on
because my ancestors my um great aunts and great uncles they told me if you do not spell geisler
g e i s z l e r we're not related and if you do spell it with the z we are well guess what
that's not right because it just so happens in german because this is the german name
sc is really a beta and when that name came over to america there's no beta the funky looking bee
it's a really cool bee so what did they do well they came up with their spellings sometimes it's
ss sometimes it's s z sometimes it's just an s and sometimes it's completely different sometimes it's
actually spelled with a k instead of a g at the beginning and s s sscs you get the idea so don't
get hung up on the spelling of the names learn to have a big list of all the phonetic variations
of how your name could be spelled and then also make sure if it goes from a language
that doesn't have like similar letters in the new place your ancestors migrated to
did you go and find the various spellings in that original language as well now that is
only seven of the mistakes that i know i have made which is why i shared them with you i don't want
you to make the mistake same mistakes i did for probably a few too many years than i should have
be sure that you subscribe to this channel so you can see more videos to help you with climbing your
family tree and making those connections that are so powerful to get you started on what to watch
next i've already pre-selected the next videos for you to watch and it's this one right here