You find him in the 1880 census, but not in 1870. You know where your great-great-grandmother died, but you can't find anything that identifies her parents. A marriage record should exist, yet every search comes up empty. Or perhaps you've reached that particularly maddening situation where three records give three different birthplaces and you're no longer certain you're researching the right person at all.
Welcome to the genealogy brick wall.
I've encountered enough of these over the years to learn something important: many brick walls aren't really walls. They're puzzles created by incomplete records, spelling variations, mistaken assumptions, changing boundaries, migration, indexing errors, or simply looking in the wrong place.
Before declaring an ancestor permanently lost to history, work through this checklist.
You may be surprised by what shakes loose.
1. Write Down Exactly What You're Trying to Discover
This sounds almost ridiculously simple, but it's one of the most useful things you can do.
Instead of saying:
"I can't find anything about John Murphy."
Turn the problem into a specific research question:
Who were the parents of John Murphy, who lived in Worcester County, Massachusetts, in 1880?
Or:
Where was Sarah Johnson living between her marriage in 1867 and her appearance in the 1880 census?
A vague problem encourages vague searching. A precise question tells you what evidence you actually need.
Write the question at the top of a page. Then keep your research focused on answering it.
Genealogy websites make it dangerously easy to wander away from your original problem. You start looking for a marriage record and forty minutes later you're researching the second husband of your ancestor's sister's mother-in-law.
Interesting? Certainly.
Helpful? Perhaps not.
2. Review Everything You Already Know
Before searching for another record, stop searching.
Yes, really.
Go back through every record you've already collected for the person.
Birth records. Marriage records. Death certificates. Census schedules. Obituaries. Gravestones. Military records. City directories. Probate files. Land deeds. Newspaper notices. Church records. Family photographs.
Read them again.
This time, don't just look for the obvious information.
Look at witnesses, informants, neighbors, occupations, addresses, middle names, burial places and people with unfamiliar surnames.
A name you've ignored for years may suddenly become important.
Who witnessed the marriage?
Who reported the death?
Who lived next door?
Who served as executor of the estate?
Who was living in the household but had a different surname?
Genealogical clues have a habit of hiding in the margins.
3. Build a Timeline
If you don't already have a timeline for your problem ancestor, make one.
List every event you can document chronologically:
1842: Approximate birth
1864: Marriage
1865: Daughter born
1867: Son born
1870: Census
1873: Land purchase
1875: Daughter baptized
1880: Census
1887: Wife dies
1892: City directory
1898: Death
Then look at the spaces between the events.
Those gaps are often where the mystery lives.
Perhaps the family appears in Ohio in 1870 and Iowa in 1880. That tells you migration occurred sometime during that decade.
Can you narrow it further using children's birthplaces?
City directories?
Tax lists?
Land transactions?
Church registers?
Newspaper notices?
Timelines turn a pile of documents into a story, and stories make missing chapters much easier to see.
4. Question Every Assumption
This step has demolished more than a few of my own brick walls.
Ask yourself:
What do I think I know that I haven't actually proved?
Perhaps Grandma said the family came from Ireland.
Perhaps an online tree gives your ancestor's birth year as 1832.
Perhaps his gravestone says he was born in New York.
Those are clues. They aren't necessarily facts.
Even official records can contain mistakes.
A death certificate may contain excellent information about someone's death but terrible information about their birth seventy years earlier. The informant might have been a son-in-law who never met the deceased's parents.
Separate what the evidence actually says from what you've concluded from it.
Sometimes the brick wall turns out to be built on one incorrect assumption.
5. Search for Name Variations
Names are wonderfully unreliable things.
Spelling wasn't always standardized, handwriting was misread, clerks wrote what they heard, immigrants adapted names, and modern indexers occasionally had to decipher handwriting that resembles something produced by a spider dipped in ink.
Don't search only for the spelling you know.
A surname such as McDonnell might appear as:
McDonald
MacDonnell
McDaniel
M'Donnell
Donnell
McDonell
And that's before indexing errors enter the picture.
Try searching with wildcards when a database allows them. Search using only a first name, age and location. Search without a first name. Search by spouse or child.
Sometimes the fastest way to find John Murphy is to stop searching for John Murphy.
6. Search the Whole Family
One of the most useful principles in genealogy is also one of the easiest to forget:
Your ancestor did not live alone.
If you can't find your great-great-grandmother, search for her siblings.
If you can't identify her parents, investigate her brothers.
If your ancestor disappears from the census, look for the children individually.
A sibling's marriage certificate might name the parents when your ancestor's does not.
A brother's obituary might identify their hometown.
A sister's death certificate might provide their mother's maiden name.
One child may have been baptized in a church whose register contains details about the entire family.
Your direct ancestor may have left a terrible paper trail while a sibling left a magnificent one.
Take advantage of the better-documented relatives.
7. Investigate Friends, Associates and Neighbors
Genealogists often call this cluster research or the FAN principle: Friends, Associates and Neighbors.
People rarely migrated randomly.
Families moved with relatives. Neighbors followed neighbors. Members of the same church settled together. Immigrants from the same village often clustered in the same American communities.
So look beyond your surname.
Examine nearby households on census pages.
Look at witnesses on marriages and deeds.
Study baptismal sponsors.
Notice who bought adjoining land.
Pay attention to recurring names.
If the same Patrick Sullivan appears beside your ancestor in Massachusetts, witnesses his land purchase and later turns up living three farms away in Wisconsin, that's probably worth investigating.
Your ancestor's social network can become a trail of breadcrumbs.
8. Search the Location, Not Just the Person
When we hit a brick wall, our instinct is often to keep typing the ancestor's name into increasingly desperate search boxes.
Instead, research the place.
What county existed at the time?
Did its boundaries change?
Where were marriages recorded?
Which churches served the community?
What newspapers circulated there?
Are tax records available?
Probate records?
Land records?
Court files?
Local histories?
Cemetery transcriptions?
You may discover that you've been searching the wrong county entirely.
A family could remain on the same farm for fifty years while the county, township or even state jurisdiction around them changed.
The people stayed put.
The records moved.
9. Look Between the Federal Censuses
The ten-year gap between U.S. federal censuses is enormous in genealogical terms.
A person can marry, have four children, move twice, buy land and die before the next census taker arrives.
Fortunately, other records can help fill the gap.
Try city directories, state censuses, tax lists, voter registrations, land records, school records, church registers and newspapers.
City directories are especially useful in urban research because they can sometimes trace a person year by year.
They may even reveal the exact moment something changed.
One year:
Henry Wilson, carpenter, 24 Oak Street
The next:
Wilson, Mary, widow of Henry, 24 Oak Street
Suddenly you have a narrow window in which to search for Henry's death.
That's a much better problem than "Henry disappeared sometime before 1900."
10. Search Newspapers Differently
Searching newspapers by exact name can be surprisingly ineffective.
Try searching for:
an address
a spouse's name
a business name
a sibling
a distinctive occupation
a town combined with the surname
And don't stop at obituaries.
Look for marriages, accidents, lawsuits, property sales, social columns, court proceedings, business advertisements, estate notices and local gossip.
Our ancestors were doing ordinary human things long before anyone imagined genealogists would someday come looking for them.
Newspapers recorded an astonishing amount of it.
11. Examine Land and Probate Records
If you've been relying primarily on census and vital records, land and probate research can feel intimidating.
It's worth the effort.
Deeds can establish relationships, residences, migrations and connections between families.
Probate files can be even richer.
A will might identify children, grandchildren, married daughters, deceased relatives and neighbors.
But don't search only for a will.
Many people died intestate, meaning without one.
Their estates could still generate administration papers, inventories, guardianships, petitions, receipts and distributions.
Sometimes the most useful probate record is a scrap of paper showing who received $17.43 from the estate.
Because that person may be the relative you've been trying to identify for fifteen years.
12. Look for the Women
Women can become frustratingly difficult to trace when records identify them primarily through husbands.
If you don't know a woman's maiden name, don't simply keep searching for a marriage certificate that may never appear.
Look sideways.
Investigate her children's records.
Marriage records, death certificates, baptisms and obituaries may identify their mother's maiden name.
Study people living nearby.
Examine probate records belonging to men who could have been her father or brothers.
Look at witnesses and sponsors.
And pay special attention to unusual middle names among her children and grandchildren.
Family surnames often survive there.
A son named Thomas Bradford Miller may be carrying a clue to his mother's family right in the middle of his name.
13. Search for Records That Aren't Online
This is an important one.
We have become so accustomed to enormous genealogy databases that it's easy to unconsciously assume:
If I can't find it online, it doesn't exist.
That is absolutely not true.
Vast quantities of genealogical material remain undigitized.
Records may be sitting in:
county courthouses
town halls
state archives
historical societies
libraries
churches
diocesan archives
university collections
genealogical societies
local museums
Some collections have been digitized but aren't indexed, meaning a normal name search won't find them.
Browse catalogs rather than relying entirely on search boxes.
The record you need may exist perfectly happily outside Google's reach.
14. Search the Original Record
Indexes are wonderful.
Indexes are also dangerous.
They are finding aids, not substitutes for the original record.
Whenever possible, view the actual image.
An index may omit witnesses, occupations, addresses, marginal notes, parents, previous marriages and other valuable information.
It may also be wrong.
If an index says your ancestor was "Jno. M. Hary," take a look at the handwriting yourself.
You might discover the clerk actually wrote "Jno. McCarty."
One small transcription error can make someone virtually invisible to a database search.
15. Keep a Research Log
Nothing makes a stubborn brick wall worse than repeatedly searching the same collection because you can't remember whether you searched it three years ago.
Keep track of:
What you searched
Where you searched
When you searched
What search terms you used
What you found
What you didn't find
Negative results matter.
If you searched a complete run of marriage records from 1860 through 1870 and didn't find the couple, record that fact.
Next time you return to the problem, you'll know to try another jurisdiction, denomination or type of record rather than retracing your footprints.
16. Revisit Old Research With Fresh Eyes
Genealogy brick walls aren't always solved in one heroic research session.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is put the problem aside.
Return six months later.
Or two years later.
New collections may have become available. Newspapers may have been digitized. Search technology may have improved. DNA matches may have appeared.
More importantly, you will have changed.
You'll know more.
You'll recognize record types you once ignored.
You'll notice relationships you didn't understand before.
I've had clues sitting in my own files for years before I finally understood what they meant.
The evidence hadn't changed.
The genealogist had.
17. Ask the Most Useful Brick-Wall Question
When everything else fails, ask yourself:
If this person were deliberately trying to hide from me, where else could I find them?
Then stop searching for the person directly.
Search for the spouse.
The children.
The siblings.
The neighbors.
The land.
The church.
The cemetery.
The address.
The employer.
The probate file.
The lawsuit.
The newspaper.
Genealogy becomes much more interesting once you realize that people leave traces everywhere.
A person may disappear from one set of records while remaining perfectly visible in another.
Before You Declare the Wall Impenetrable
When you're stuck, run through the checklist one more time:
Define one precise research question.
Review every record you've already collected.
Build a chronological timeline.
Identify assumptions that haven't been proven.
Search spelling and name variations.
Research siblings, spouses and children.
Investigate friends, associates and neighbors.
Study the history of the location and its boundaries.
Search records between census years.
Search newspapers using more than names.
Examine land and probate records.
Look for clues to female ancestors through relatives.
Find collections that aren't searchable online.
Examine original records rather than relying on indexes.
Keep a research log, including unsuccessful searches.
Revisit the problem after you've gained new information or experience.
Most importantly, resist the temptation to solve a brick wall by accepting the first convenient answer.
Finding someone with the right name isn't the same thing as finding your person.
Good genealogy requires patience with uncertainty.
Sometimes you'll spend an evening searching and discover absolutely nothing.
Then, on another evening, you'll notice that the witness on an 1863 marriage record has the same surname as the family living next door in 1850.
You investigate that family.
One record leads to another.
A probate file names a married daughter.
A newspaper notice mentions her brother.
And suddenly the ancestor who has been hiding from you for years has parents, siblings and a hometown.
The wall didn't fall all at once.
You simply found the loose brick.
