It seems that almost every person doing genealogy has that one area of their family tree where they hit a brick wall. They are just hunting for that one piece of information to be able to tear down the wall. Some people are lucky to stumble upon the piece they need. Others, like me, look for years, even decades and just can’t seem to find that little piece of information.
Recently I was taking an Irish genealogy course on how to break down brick walls. The first thing they taught was that you must know the town or parish of your ancestor. If you know that then you can figure out many things from that one piece of information. Yet, the most important piece is exactly what I am missing.
Yet, the most important piece is exactly what I am missing.
Where to begin?
What did I start with? Not much. We knew his name, his supposed age, and his birth country of Ireland all from the 1860 US census. I say supposed age because, well sometimes people didn’t know and so they guessed. Some lied. And in some case it was just written down wrong. In the 1860 census he was 40 in August when the census was done. In the 1870 census it still says he was born in Ireland but says he was 52 in June. So now I know he was probably born between 1818 and 1820. That was it. I had no death date nor was he in any more census records. I also had no burial records. What now?
I took my mom and aunt, and we went on an adventure [...] to the county courthouse.
So I took my mom and aunt, and we went on an adventure. We went to the county courthouse, where he lived according to the census records, to see if we could find any more documents. As fate would have it, there were no death records due to a fire.
Probate records!!
But, they had his probate records!!!! From the probate records, I now knew when he died, and how old he was (which by the way showed he was born in 1818). The probate records were a bounty of important information! Hooray!
However, we hit dead ends on everything else.
Church records
Being Catholic we know he would have been buried in a Catholic cemetery, however we could find no records. We walked every little cemetery near and in the town where he lived. No luck. I called the Catholic diocese to see if they could find records. No luck.
Still looking
For now I will wait and keep looking. I am currently using DNA and trying to get in touch with those I share DNA with to see if I can hook our family trees together for that line of my tree.
One day maybe I will take a trip to Ireland with the knowledge of the hometown of my great great grandfather.
