I have records in my genealogy files that I’ve looked at more times than I can count.
Then I’ll open one again months or even years later and notice something I completely missed. It isn’t necessarily because I read it badly the first time. I simply didn’t know enough yet to understand what I was looking at.
A name that meant nothing to me six months ago may now be someone I recognize. A place I skimmed past may turn out to be important. Even a witness I ignored may suddenly connect two families I’ve been trying to sort out.
That’s why I go back to old records.
You Know More Now
The first time you find a baptism record, you may be interested mainly in the child and the parents. Later, after you’ve spent some time researching the family, you may notice the witnesses.
One of those witnesses has a surname you’ve now seen in several other records. Another lives in a place you’ve recently learned was only a short distance from the family’s home. None of that information changed. Your knowledge did.
The more you learn about a family, the neighborhood, and the records themselves, the more useful an old document can become.
Read the Image, Not Just the Index
Indexes are wonderful for finding records, but they aren’t the record. If an original image is available, I want to see it.
A transcription may give you a name, date, and parish. The image may also tell you where the family lived, what the father’s occupation was, who witnessed the event, or how the minister described someone. And oftentimes, the transcription is simply wrong.
I’ve seen names that made perfect sense in an index until I looked at the image and realized the handwriting could be read another way.
That can change the search considerably.
Look at the Records Around It
I also like to look at the entries before and after the one I came for. This has been especially useful while working with church records.
Families often appear repeatedly in the same register. Neighbors show up as witnesses. The same surnames turn up again and again. A farm or estate name may appear with several families who were connected in ways you haven’t figured out yet.
If you only save the one entry returned by the search, you can miss that context. I’ll go through several pages. If I’m working on a difficult problem, I may go through much more than that.
It isn’t fascinating research, but neither is discovering later that the clue you needed was two lines below the record you downloaded.
Handwriting Gets Easier With Familiarity
Old handwriting can be miserable at first. You don’t need to be a professional at reading historical handwriting.
One of the best ways I’ve found to deal with it is to keep reading the same person’s handwriting.
If a minister or clerk wrote an entire register, you begin to recognize how he formed certain letters. A word that looked impossible on one page becomes much easier after you’ve seen the same letters used in names or words you already know.
The surrounding entries can help here too. If you’re unsure whether a place name begins with an L or an S, find other words on the page that begin with those letters and compare them.
You don’t always need a handwriting expert. You just need more examples of the handwriting.
Old Research Deserves Another Look Too
This doesn’t apply only to historical records.
Go back through your own old research occasionally. Look at the records you saved when you first started working on the family. Read your notes. Check the sources attached to your tree. Open some of those images again.
You may be surprised by what you notice now. You may not have noticed the importance of a particular surname when you first saw it. Maybe you’ve since learned that two places mentioned in separate records were neighboring farms. It could be a person you thought was unrelated has now appeared three more times.
Research builds on itself. A record that answered one question five years ago may help answer a completely different question today. I’ve learned not to assume that because I already have a record, I’ve gotten everything I can from it.
That record deserves another turn.
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