Life can be complicated and figuring out what happened in ancestors’ lives can be tricky. Here is a case from my own family history; I hope it will be a useful cautionary tale.

With a holiday card this year my dad received a brief list of ancestors’ names and life dates. This was quite exciting for me and I read the list with great interest. However, I realized the information was incorrect and this spurred me to figure out why and to set about correcting the misinformation.

I had interviewed my grandfather over 30 years ago and had a good idea of his mother’s (Mary’s) family group. Mary’s mother died giving birth to Mary’s younger sibling and Mary grew up with a step-mother. I knew the surnames of the two mothers and the first names of Mary’s step-siblings as well. I searched the census documents and found her birth mother: ‘Anna.’ Then I followed the family forward through time in the censuses. The next one had only Mary, her sibling and her father, and the next showed two parents and Mary’s new siblings. The mother (really the step-mother) was listed as ‘Anna.’ Had I not known independently about the change in the family composition, these census documents alone would not have told me. I then progressed through all available subsequent census forms and found on one that there was a column regarding length of marriage. There was a very tiny notation that the husband was in his second marriage while the wife (step-mother) was in her first. This would have been easy to miss if one was only looking for the names on the census and not reading the rest of the page.

This raised the question of why the names of the two women appeared the same. I then traced the marriage records through a historical society marriage index. By searching under the husband’s name I was able to find both records and saw the first woman’s name listed as ‘Anna Marie’ and the second woman’s listed as ‘Johanna;’ both names had been shortened to ‘Anna’ – very convenient for the husband!

So, the moral of this story is to test your assumptions about your family history by consulting all available historic documents. Record interviews at every opprtunity. Look at the whole sequence of applicable censuses, reading each page completely. (I was fortunate to be working with US censuses: there are state and federal lists which provide frequent windows on a family’s life. As well, the US censuses are available to 1940, whereas the most recent accessible census here in Canada is 1916.) Then cross-check your data with other types of relevant documents, such as marriage records. Unlike today, infant and mother mortality was high in the past and led to changes in family composition that we might not expect. Historic documents and oral histories can provide the clues to untangling your family’s story.

This article was originally printed in the Bergen News and is being reprinted with permission.