How To Grow a Sturdy Family Tree

A sturdy, full-grown family tree can't be purchased at your local nursery or tree farm, nor will a family history "sapling" reach its full height overnight.

The process, however, for getting either to develop into a specimen that can withstand the test of time is much the same: nurturing over many years.

Any horticulturist will tell you there's more than one "right" way to grow a tree to shade your backyard. Variables like location, soil composition, and a gardener's personality and expertise are all factors in success or failure. And so it is with a family tree.

In her hub Start At The End, JKeiser stresses the importance of documenting, documenting, documenting, and always citing a source, even if it was told to you by Great-Aunt Agnes.

Since being bitten by the genealogy bug in 1981, I totally agree.

My quest began with my mother's people, whom I soon found out were experts at keeping secrets by re-writing history, or simply leaving out anything deemed unpleasant altogether. Actually a good thing for me, because after following several false leads they happily provided, I learned early on not to accept any "fact" at face value.

Even so, I'm not terribly diligent about citing sources in my Legacy database. Most of the time I'll simply note the origin of the information in the Notes section for the individual it refers to. Hard copies of censuses, wills and such are in file drawers and 3-ring binders, so if pressed, I can produce the necessary documentation.

But since my goal is not to publish the contents of my database in book form to sell to relatives or be deposited in local libraries, I find no justification for writing citations worthy of the standards of the NGS (National Genealogical Society).

If my children or grandchildren choose to publish them after I'm gone, they're welcome to my copy of Elizabeth Shown Mills' Evidence: Citation and Analysis for the Family Historian, which at the risk of having the Citation Police at my door tomorrow morning, is as pristine as the day I bought it because I rarely open it.

I never ever upload the contents of my database to the web.

Thanks to a nightmarish experience in the early days of the internet, neither do I share it with anyone except one trusted research buddy. We were stung by the same distant cousin who despite seemingly sincere promises to the contrary, uploaded everything we shared with him to every genealogy site he could find that offered free access in exchange for it.

The result being information meant to remain private was spread to the far corners of Cyberspace, as well as the research bud's working notes. Undocumented data. Conjecture. Clues to check out that might or might not prove accurate. Most of which is still out there, because it would've been a full-time job to find all the sites the traitor put it on and then post disclaimers and corrections.

We did try. We did. For no other reason than most newbies to genealogy can't tell fact from fiction, and in no time conjecture is re-posted all over the web as "fact".

My 3rd great-grandfather, Frederick Cupp, Sr., born in 1778 during the Revolutionary War is an example. Google him some time and when a site comes up that shows him with a father, you'll be looking at conjecture became "fact".

Never mind that a decade before the internet, I and other serious Cupp researchers had combed records from RevWar Pennsylvania for Fred's parents and can assure you that no such record exists. None. His line ends at a brick wall that will never be breached, but this doesn't deter those who want to connect him to a Cupp family in West Virginia. (I have the RevWar and bible records of that bunch too, and there's NO connection...)

On to post-menopausal mothers and "dead" men who remarry...

After nearly 30 years nurturing a family tree, one develops a sense for which branches look "healthy" and which don't, no matter how many descendants claim otherwise. For instance, a child supposedly born to a 49-yr-old woman with teenage daughters 15, 16, and 17 is usually a grandchild, and will show up in a later census as such.

Then there are the perfectly healthy husbands in their early twenties who "die" shortly after the birth of the couple's third or fourth child. Not the wife, but the husband . If a "widow" hasn't remarried within a year or so, don't bother scouring local cemeteries for Hubby's grave. Look instead for him, magically resurrected, starting a new branch in the next county or another state.

Forget how things should be... Think outside the box.

A family tree really flourishes if its growth isn't stunted by the mindset that "[whatever] can't possibly have happened". Aside from the biologically impossible, most anything can and does happen. Ancestors, after all, are human , not saints. Be open to the idea that they made many of the same errors in judgment that we do today.

My research bud and I have toppled many a brick wall by playing "What If?". The sillier or more outlandish the scenario, the better the chance the impossible will seem possible.

At the risk of being labeled totally nuts, we also suspect some ancestors resist discovery until the wild imaginings of a couple of descendants force them to drop a clue where we'll find it. There's no other explanation for the urge to drive into a cemetery you didn't know existed and randomly park next to the grave that turns out to be that of an ancestor you thought was buried hundreds of miles away.

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Despite being a somewhat casual gardener, my tree grows and flourishes.