welcome to the ancestral findings podcast this is episode 236 have you ever searched
a record collection or book looking for a family or ancestor you know should be
there and come up empty-handed it could be because of MIS indexing today I'll talk
about how miss indexing happens and how you can get around it to find your people
locating seemingly lost families and individual ancestors is an ongoing chore for most
genealogists you simply cannot do family history for very long before encountering your first lost
branch on the family tree most of the time these lost branches can be found pretty quickly with
a little more in-depth creative searching other times however the people you seek are nowhere to
be found no matter where you search for them and what methods you use that is why there are so many
articles and pieces of advice online on how to dig deeper and find your missing ancestors there
can never be too many tips in this regard even the best tips may not work for every researcher so the
more tips on finding missing ancestors the better because the next one you read may be the one that
helps you finally break down that brick wall and find your missing family there are new techniques
being developed and written about all the time some people come up with their own methods that
work for them and publish them other tips come from the personal storehouse of professional
genealogists here to help you get those straggling hidden ancestors out in the open is an important
searching tip you may not have heard of before that can produce miraculous results in uncovering
lost ancestors for generations maybe it'll work for you too one of the reasons you may
not be finding your ancestors is because they were Mis indexed this means they are in fact
in the records just not where you would expect them to be or under the names or Spelling's you
would imagine miss indexing is actually a huge issue in the genealogical research community
yet it is one that many genealogists do not even consider when working on breaking down or getting
around their brick walls to do away with the MIS indexing problem and find your missing ancestors
you first need to understand how they came to be Mis indexed in the first place indexing has
been being done since at least the 1200 80s when an index of the Bible was produced that employed
500 monks to create it before the age of word processors that could easily scan documents and
produce accurate indexes on demand people had to do it by hand this often meant going through books
and writing down the information to be indexed in another book usually alphabetically but not always
then compiling the indexing information in some semblance of order often on note cards on cut-up
pieces of paper or in notebooks needless to say this by hand method resulted in many indexing
mistakes indexing in this manner can produce a lot of errors due to simple human nature the
indexing person missed information that needed to be in the index or they did not recognize two
different spellings of the same name as the same name they may have put wrong page numbers next
to names or indicated wrong volume numbers for indexes of multi-volume collections with all of
these possibilities for mistakes it is no wonder you cannot find your ancestors you would have to
read the entire book and not miss a thing or go through the whole record collection yourself again
missing nothing to find the family or person you seek also frustrating for the genealogist is the
lack of an index you have probably come across some old books such as town and County histories
memoirs and even government record collections that did not have indexes if these sources are
large then reading through them all looking for one name or a family name can be a daunting
task how much genealogical information has been overlooked for lack of an index how many people
have the answers to their missing ancestors right there in unindexed books and record collections
probably quite a few with an accurate index these missing people could easily be found and presented
to the world once more so what do you do when you suspect your ancestors may have been Mis indexed
there are a few different strategies for finding them number one check all of the spelling variants
if the source you are using has an index and you believe your ancestor should be in there
but you haven't found them search the index for all possible named variants first letters first
vowels and the letter H anywhere in the name are common causes of misspellings think about how the
name sounds phonetically and come up with some plausible alternate spellings for it then look
in the index for those number to search by only the first name this only works if you are using
an electronic index such as the one you would find online it could be highly effective though
the surname may have been so misspelled that you simply cannot locate it or if you did you didn't
recognize it as one that could belong to your ancestors if this is true then try searching
by first name only if you know the area your ancestors lived and their approximate age at the
time your particular record source was compiled you can often find them by using their first name
place a birth and age this technique has worked for me personally numerous times revealing hidden
ancestors in the records who I would have never located otherwise number three consider spaces
when you search names that start with M CMAC or o apostrophe are usually spelled as all one word
sometimes though indexers include a space between those beginnings and the rest of the surname which
can move their proper location in an index check on the spellings of these names both with and
without a space and you may find them if nothing else you can always read the entire book or record
collection if you are sure your ancestors should be in there it will take time but ultimately it
is worth it to bring a lost family or ancestor out of the myths of time and into the genealogy world
are you descended from royalty most genealogists would love to discover this it is something that
sounds prestigious and gives you bragging rights in genealogical societies the thing is mathematics
says we are all descended from royalty whether or not we can prove it on paper next time I'll show
you how our royal heritage is possible thanks for joining me today I'll see you next time on
the ancestral findings podcast and for further info you can visit us at ancestral findings com