Taking a Wrecking Ball to Your Genealogy Brick Wall

Do You Have a Brick Wall Ancestor?

Assembling your family history is not always easy, despite some of the recent major advances in accessibility to a broad range of records online. Most family historians will inevitably run into an ancestral brick wall at some point. These are ancestors who seem to have somehow dodged every way of leaving a useful documentary footprint. We know they were born, we know they had at least one child, we know they died. That may be all we know. Somehow they resist our every effort to pinpoint where they came from.

Brick Wall Smashing Ideas

Start with what you KNOW.

I don’t mean what you think you know. Especially if you’ve been working on this ancestor for a while, you may have unwittingly gathered some assumptions that you are now working from. They may be leading you down the wrong path. Start from scratch. Relook at every piece of both evidence and hearsay with a critical fresh eye. If you have been well-organised and cited all your sources, it will be an easy task to gather everything in front of you and begin again. If not, rummage through it all till you have everything.

Reassess each piece of evidence one by one.

• Are you sure each one pertains to your ancestor? Is there any chance that one or more of them refers to another person of a similar name? Eliminate any red herrings.
• Do you have the primary source of that evidence? If what you have is a transcription or an extract from an index, or you have found it in someone else’s tree, or just heard it on the grapevine you need to find the actual document if possible. It may well contain more information and is less likely to contain errors.
• Are there potential clues that you overlooked first time around? For example, witnesses and informants who may be related to or close friends of the brick wall ancestor, or causes of death which may lead you to a newspaper report of an accident.

Make a timeline

Now, construct a timeline of their life using your evidence to see what’s missing. You may find you have a reasonable picture of their later life but they seem to have popped up out of nowhere as an adult.

Focus

Looking at the information you have, decide what is the most critical question you need to answer about this person to move forward and focus on that with laser intensity. A scattergun approach will not serve you well. Don’t forget to document what you’ve checked as you go to prevent you from going over the same ground multiple times.

Where are the gaps?

For example, do you have a birth record or a baptism? Probably not, or they wouldn’t be a brick wall! What sources do you have that may give a clue to their approximate year and/or place of birth? Censuses, marriage records, death or burial records, obituaries, school records, military records, passport applications, electoral rolls, immigration records? Do they appear in any newspapers of the time? Find out what sources are available for the area that your ancestor was in at the time that might contain this information, and plunder them all mercilessly. If you’re pretty sure you know where your brick wall ancestor was probably baptised but they don’t appear in indexed searches, go to the parish register images and browse through every page in case they were missed or mistranscribed.

A rose by any other name…

Try every variant of the person’s name. There are often spelling variants for both given and surnames, especially before widespread literacy became the norm. Their given and middle names may be transposed in documents (they may have been known by their middle name in later life). Check for contractions or pet forms of their names, for example, Robert may be Bob or Rob or Bobby or Robbie. Sometimes they’re not so obvious – Mary Anns often became Polly!

Think big

What was happening in the local area at that point in history? If they didn’t originally come from there, what might have brought them to the area and where from? Look for local histories, newspapers etc that will give you a better idea of the broader social history that influenced their life. Check here for a good source of local histories.

Think wide

‘FAN’ out! FAN stands for ‘Family, Associates and Neighbours’. By researching those around your brick wall ancestor, you may uncover clues to their origins. I will be dedicating an entire blog to the importance of FAN-ning, so stay tuned for that one!

Recheck periodically

If you do all these things and still don’t break the brick wall, put it aside for a few months and carry on researching a different part of your tree. It can be good to come back with fresh eyes, because you may see a pattern you didn’t notice the last time. Also, more and more records are becoming accessible every day. Therefore, what you can’t access now may well be easy to get to the next time you try.

Have you tried DNA?

If you haven’t already had your DNA done, consider it for this purpose. I’ve had a few brick walls smashed by utilizing information gained from matching with others and working out the common ancestor between us. Ethnicity estimates may also in some cases be a signpost to where to look, but are not specific or accurate enough yet to be taken as standalone evidence.

Consider professional help

If you are despairing of finding your brick wall ancestor’s origins, try a professional genealogist who has some experience of researching the country or area where your family’s history takes place (for British or Australian brick walls, in particular, you are welcome to contact me!). They often know of more obscure sources that may contain the information you need and will be able to contextualize the information you have to come up with some new ideas of how to find the information. Make sure you have logged everything you have already done and cited sources to minimise the time you will be paying for. Sometimes a professional can bring a breakthrough in just hours on a problem that has held you up for years!