Common Mistakes when Tracing your Family Tree

We can be thankful that what is important has long since been identified by generations of genealogists who learned the hard way - by making mistakes galore and putting disproportionate effort into relatively fruitless activities.

When it comes to old records - or any aspect of your family history interests - a few carefully chosen bits of knowledge and core researching skills will suffice for most people most of the time. Mistakes are inevitable, but it is better to learn from one rather than six.

Not every word or event has equal importance to your overall research. Names, for example, have high priority, along with places and dates as they form a foundation for later research.

A 'trees and forest', or 'detail and big picture' approach applies across the board. There are some things that a detailed word by word study will not reveal, such as the context and comparisons in other parts of a document. Likewise, a fast skim read will miss important detail.

Much of the difficulty in reading old documents relates simply to the personal style of the handwriting, complete with flourishes and idiosyncratic embellishments. Some types of handwriting were not taught at school, but by notaries and other professionals to their clerks or students. For example the 'secretary hand', the 'italic hand', and the 'court hand' all had distinctive forms of character and abbreviations. All this is on top of the differences as taught by different teachers, and of course the individual's own style.

Remember that records were made by individuals, with their own ideas, feelings, talents and intentions. They even had their own grammar and spelling. In an age of universal illiteracy there was not much accountability nor standards to apply. Why shouldn't a clerk spell a name three different ways in the course of a single document if its owner couldn't spell at all, and it made no difference to the purpose of the record or the efficiency of the system it supported?

Much of the methodology of understanding archives boils down to comparison. For example, comparing unknown words and characters with known ones in the same document. Depending on the size of the document, start from the same page, then work forwards and backwards page by page in turn - you may not have to check far for a given word, and familiarity will help with other queries. The job is much easier if you know the context and what is probably being communicated or recorded. Thus by finding a difficult word or character whose meaning is clear, you can better understand it in a less obvious context.