What's in a name? Adelia, Delia, Bedilia and Bridget.

My great-great grandmother, Adelia O'Reilly Fagan, was born in Ireland and until recently, she was a genealogical brick wall.  You know what I mean.  We all have them.  They're the ancestors that you can't seem to find origins for, no matter how hard you look.  For a long time, I didn't even bother.  Irish ancestors are notoriously difficult to track down, partly due to destruction of records and even more due to the fact that the records were scattered all across the country in various repositories.  If you didn't know a townland, you weren't going to get very far.

The first break in the case came a few years ago, when I ordered a copy of Adelia's death certificate from the Pennsylvania Vital Records Division.  This was before they passed the law that allowed open records access to older vital records, so you had to know exactly what you were looking for back then, no outside access to the index was allowed.  Once I had that, it gave me more of the information I was going to need to find Adelia's family back in Ireland.  Her father's name was Laurence O'Reilly, and her mother's was Adelia Treston - which I promptly misread the handwriting on as "Tresson".  No worries, I eventually got it figured out and it only took a year or two!  Let's warp ahead a few years.  I found Adelia listed among the obituaries published in Luzerne County papers in 1933.  I ordered a copy of her obituary, and got some surprises.  Her obituary gave her place of birth as Dublin, and stated she had a sister still living in Jersey City named Nora Cahill.  I haven't had much luck tracking any additional information on Nora down, unfortunately.  But at least I had a place in Ireland to start looking.

My Basics

Let's kick things off with some tips on getting started.  Maybe you're a newbie to this whole ancestry thing, or maybe you've been at it awhile but can always stand a refresher.  So here are some of the basic ideas I find most valuable to remember on a day-to-day basis in the course of doing research.  I won't go so far as to say these are the basics, but these tend to be my basics.

1. Start with what you know.  Maybe it's a lot, maybe it's not, but most people know at least their parents' names.  Start there.  Dredge up any memories of anything anyone in your family may have told you about relatives you were too young to remember.  When you've exhausted your own memory reserves, move on to step 2.
2. Talk to your relatives.  If you have older relatives who are still living, the places and people they remember can be extremely helpful.  You might even find out some of your family have already been working on your family's genealogy and have covered some groundwork already.  If you work together and share information, you can get even more done than just one person alone.
3. Documentation is vital.  If there was one piece of advice that I would say is the most important to every genealogist starting out, it would be to document everything.  That way, you can easily reassess information later if you have a clear citation stating where you got it in the first place.  If you share your tree online, it's also helpful for other researchers if they know that you have a source backing up your information.  There are far too many trees online that don't document, and while their information may be good, without those citations the rest of us have no way of knowing how reliable they are.  Which brings us to:
4. Be wary of unsourced information.  Spurious family trees abound on the internet.  We've probably all been fooled at one time or another.  When you're basing your information off a relative's personal knowledge, it's fine to cite "Relative A, Interview" as your source.  But when you get into names and dates of people a little further up the tree, backing up your data with citations to primary sources such as vital records, church records, census records and so on makes your tree a lot more reliable and makes you a much more responsible historian.  If you wish to follow a path paved by an undocumented online tree, tread carefully.  And don't republish the information without doing your own detective work to back things up.
5. Also be aware that not everything can be sourced easily and directly.  I know, I've just contradicted myself!  Sometimes that record you need to link your great-grandma to a specific family proves elusive.  Sometimes there are discrepancies in the records that we do have.  Say you have a death certificate for your great grandmother that gives her parents' names.  And you also have an obituary that tells you where she was born, but she was born before official birth registrations began in that locale.  Not only that, but the majority of the census data for that location no longer exists for the time period she lived there.  And when you do find a family with the names that match, the first name of her mother isn't the same as the one on the certificate.  What to do?  This is when you rely on something we call "preponderance of evidence."  You weigh up what you do have, and try to make up the difference with any alternative sources that you can (contemporary newspapers can be invaluable for these situations).  If what you have proven more often than not matches up with what you find, you can make a determination as to whether you've found the right family or not.   You can also try to determine if the discrepancies in your data can be explained in context of the time and location your ancestor lived.  (I'll post more on the specific inspiration for my example at a later time.)
6. When in doubt, take notes and move on.  In the course of my research, I've often come across names of ancestors' siblings or other unexplained relations in various sources and have no other information available to determine whether the person actually is who I suspect they are.  This is where the notes section of whatever genealogy program you use to collect your data comes in handy.  You can put in the notes section whatever it is that you've found, and whatever questions you'd like to answer about that piece of information.  That way it's not in your "official" data (in case your supposition is wrong), but it's easily available to you to reevaluate at any time if and when you collect additional information.  Most programs also give you the option of keeping your notes private if you publish your tree online, or you can go ahead and publish those notes and hope someone who sees them might have the answers to your questions.
7. Never underestimate the importance of context. This is one of those things that studying archaeology clarified for me as a genealogist.  In archaeology, context is everything.  A potsherd is just a fragment of clay without the proper context in which to place it.  Much like that, a name is just a name without the proper context.  Say you have a "John Smith" in your family tree.  You do a search on that name, and get hundreds of results.  They can't all be your ancestor.  But narrow your search by location and time period, and you end up with the right one.  Even so, you still don't know who he was.  Become an historian, and research the places your ancestors lived.   Don't limit yourself to just your family name in a location.  Learn who they associated with, what other families they claimed kinship with.  The more you learn about your ancestors' hometowns, the more you'll learn about who they were.  And that's what I mean about putting your ancestor in context.

Genearchaeologist???

You might be asking, if you are reading this, "what in the frilly heck is a genearchaeologist?"  The truth is, it's just a portmanteau I made up, but it's also true regarding myself.  My college major was in archaeological studies, and doing genealogy isn't a whole lot different.  Just not as dirty.

In archaeology you deal with fragmentary evidence of a past civilization, and try to put together those fragments into some semblance of a narrative of human history.  Genealogy is a lot like that, on a micro level.  You're taking fragmentary evidence of the lives of your ancestors, often from a myriad of different sources and places, and cobbling those pieces together to form a narrative of their history - your personal human history.  The basics in research methodology I learned while I was in school proved invaluable to improving my skills as a genealogist, and while I may not be working in that field today, I don't regret the things I learned.