1. Climbing Genealogical Brick Walls
RRLC
Pizza and Stump the Genealogy Expert

3. Be thorough!
• Be prepared to search ALL the records of
your ancestor, ALL his kin and associates,
during ALL periods of their lives, in ALL
the jurisdictions where they lived, and ALL
possible repositories.

4. • Review what you already have - see if what
you have discovered already answers
questions now that you have more
information
• Go back to the original sources - did you
copy ALL information from a source or
only partial data?

5. • Broaden your search - check collateral
relatives, neighbors. It’s called cluster
genealogy, and sometimes you see patterns
for more than one person that help with an
individual of interest.

6. • Question and verify - many sources contain
transcription errors.
• Check name variations - not only can these
occur but sometimes a T is read or put for a
G or J. Really!

7. • Learn your boundaries - maps are important
when seeing where information is recorded.
Sometimes it is legal to record information
outside of the county where it occurred.
• Ask for help - many ways to do that.

8. Names?
• Maiden and middle names - what do people
use at various points in their lives?
• Where to find these? SSDI applications,
wedding records, court records, probate
records, obituaries.

9. • More on names: aliases, using maternal
names, shortened or translated names, ones
beginning with a vowel.
• Area searches: search an entire smaller
town, remember that addresses changes as
well as street names.
• Jurisdictions change: e.g.. Rochester
records might be in Canandaigua or
Batavia.

10. • Look in school and poorhouse records.
• Check old phone books and city directories,
church records (remembering that
congregations could divide), and election
enrollment records.

11. Immigration
• Border crossings and immigration - before
1924, the US-Canadian border did not have
formal guards.
• Did the entire family come over, or only
smaller children?
• Yugo-NY- CT-Yugo-Canada (Montreal and
Ontario)-MI.

12. • Death records - obits, funeral home records
funeral sign-in books, who is buried nearby
on a cemetery (married s having adjoining
plots?)
• Widows do remarry
• Try searching parents
• Adoption vs. abandonment: different kinds
of records

13. Remember that you are dealing with various times….
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

14. • Create a timeline to avoid inconsistencies.
• See if retirement homes or other institutions
interviewed a resident to find someone to
pay for their care.

15. Sources for elaboration
• http://genealogy.about.com/od/basics/a/brick_wal
• http://www.genealogyintime.com/GenealogyReso
• https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Solvi
ng_Tough_Research_Problems
%E2%80%94Overcoming_Brick_Walls