My father, Harold John Cooley, was born on 2/28/1918 in Melville, Stutsman County, ND.  The Court House burned down many years ago and I have been unable to find any kind of birth record.  My father did not have a copy and neither did his siblings.  What can I do?

– D Messer

Answer:

Burned counties create many challenges for genealogy researchers!  There may not be a copy of his birth certificate available from the county, but there are still ways to document his birth.

1. Check the Ancestry.com wiki to get a better understanding of where vital records and copies of those records might be kept.
2. Check the person’s other historical records to determine how consistent the date was across records.
3. If there are inconsistencies, determine which records are most likely to be correct based on who provided the information.

First, check the Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources on the Ancestry.com wiki  and see what can be learned about North Dakota’s vital records.

Depending on when the court house burned, the North Dakota Department of Health may have a copy.

But what if the certificate was burned prior to the records being collected by the state? What if it wasn’t sent?

Second, let’s gather records and check for consistency.

His date of birth appears to be consistent across government records.

His SSDI states that he was born on 2/28/1918.  He also applied for his social security number before 1951, and the government wasn’t as strict on documentation at that time, so it is doubtful that he had to show his birth certificate to prove that fact.

The entry for Harold on the U.S. Veterans Gravesites also states that his birth date was 2/28/1918.  So he was using that birth date in his military records.

Let’s look at the 1920 census record.  It was recorded on January 28, 1920 and it states that he was 3 years and 9 months old.  The instructions for the age column are “age at last birthday.”   Best guess is the enumerator wrote down current age, meaning that Harold was born April 28, 1916.

Third, we need to evaluate the validity of the information.

The SSDI and Military records suggest that Harold believed himself to be born on February 28, 1918.  And he was present at his own birth, but I don’t think he was a credible witness!

We have no idea supplied the information for Harold’s birth date on the 1920 census; that person is not identified until 1940.  We also know that the enumerator did not follow the instructions exactly here.  This may be the correct birth date, but I put a big question mark next to it.

So what should you do?

First, write to the state and try and obtain a copy of the birth certificate.  If there isn’t one, then keep collecting records and evaluate each one:

• Who supplied the information?
• Did the person who supplied the information have direct knowledge of the event?

The more records you collect, the more evidence you have to build your case.  And when a record doesn’t exist, building a case through other records is your best option.

For more on determining if a vital record exists for your ancestor, you may what to read How Do I Know If a Vital Record Exists?

Happy Searching!

Here’s one who did just that for a while: Mary Jane Hudson. Here, she’s living with her husband, Lewellan Gillespie, and their three sons in Amherst, Virginia, in 1860.

After that, they seem to disappear. Neither Mary Jane Gillespie nor Lewellan Gillespie appears in any subsequent census records. And no death records, either.

So what do you do now?

First, look for the children.  I could not find Lewis or Robert, but I did find Charles Gillespie. He’s living with his grandparents Micajah and Elvira Hudson, Mary Jane’s parents.

There could be many possible reasons for this:

1. The family has moved elsewhere and left their son with his grandparents to help out or for some other reason.
2. Lewellan and Mary Jane have both died, leaving Charles an orphan.
3. Lewellan has died, Mary Jane has remarried, and Charles has moved in with his grandparents.

Since I’ve already checked census and death records, marriage records make a logical next step. But there is no marriage record for a Mary Jane Gillespie in Amherst or surrounding counties on Ancestry.com. Now what?

You can widen the search to see if somebody out there knows something you don’t. Ancestry Member Trees and Message Boards can make a good next step. I find a tree that says Mary Jane died in September of 1870 and was married twice: first to Lewellan and then to Benjamin Franklin Campbell.

There are no sources listed, so reaching out to the member who published this would be a good idea.  Maybe he or she knows more than they have included here.

Campbell gives me another name to search, and I find a Benjamin and Mary Campbell in Amherst that might be them.

The Ancestry.com and Rootsweb message boards offer another hint:

The Benjamin F. Campbell (or Benjamin Franklin) mentioned in #3 of Lilly's post of April 24th is the son of James W. Campbell and Jane Massie. He moved back to Amherst County and was married 4 times. His first wife was Sarah A. Mays (married 12 Nov. 1857 in Amherst County; second wife, Mary Jane Hudson, m. 13 Sept 1865 in Amherst Co.; third wife, Sally Ann Hudson, m. 27 Oct. 1875; and fourth, Lelia Ann Henson m. 27 Feb. 1890. Benjamin died 16 Dec. 1907 and is buried in the Amherst Cemetery. All of the marriage records can be found and several list James W. Campbell and Jane Massie as his parents.

Again, there is no source to go back and examine, but the post does provide some clues on where to go look.  And some suggestions on what happened to Mary Jane.

There are still plenty of questions.  What happened to Lewellan? Was he killed in the Civil War? And what happened to Robert and Lewis?

We always hope to find our ancestors right where we expect them, leaving behind a trail of easy-to-follow clues.  But there are always a few who seem to try to remain in the shadows.  Look everywhere!  The answers are out there.

Happy Searching!

Ancestry Anne

Turns out, they still do. And libraries and librarians prove this every day as they help countless individual discover historical facts about their family and their history.

Ancestry.com has billions of online historical records with details about your family and others around the globe. These records are supported by additional fine details you can find at local libraries. From amazing historical and genealogical collections, our local libraries — and the amazing librarians who support them — are the perfect place to discover a new angle, source or clue that breaks your search wide open.

Ancestry.com is available in more than 2000 libraries worldwide. But we couldn’t do it without you. So to all the librarians out there, a big thank you for everything you do that helps us get closer to our ancestors.

Dear Ancestry Anne,

My grandmother’s family Bible shows that Mary E. Dawes died January 24, 1906. Knowing she lived in Pittsburgh, PA, I did a Google search and found the Pittsburg[h] Press death notice listed on January 25, 1906, page 6 column 1:

The accuracy is suspect because I cannot find any city in Virginia (or West Virginia which was part of Virginia) by the name of Westchester.  Another oddity is that she had a sister named Mrs. C. J. Dawes. This would mean that her sister married a Dawes. Or is it possibly an error and it is really her sister-in-law?

I also find that League might have been spelled Legg, which is how it’s spelled in the 1850 and 1860 censuses.

My problem is finding the ancestors of Mary Dawes to prove the direct relationship from me to Thomas Stone.

Thank you,

Jim Monaco

Dear Jim,

Let’s look at whether Mary is really the great-granddaughter of Thomas Stone.

So who were Mary’s parents?

According to her obituary, Mary was probably born around 1836 in Virginia. She moved to Fayette County, presumably Pennsylvania, when she was about 14.  This should place her in Fayette County in 1850.

The 1850 census lists only one Legg (League) family in Fayette County: the family of James Legg, which includes a Mary who is the correct age and was born in Virginia.

This is one delightful census record.  The enumerator decided to write down the counties for people born in Virginia.  So we know that:

This means that Mary was around 3 or 4 when the family moved to Fayette County, not 14.  But dates and ages can change as they get handed down as family lore.

James and Ellender Legg (League) are strong candidates to be Mary’s parents.

Is Mary E. (League) Dawes the great-granddaughter of Thomas Stone?

If James Legg (League) is Mary’s father, he was most likely born between 1801 and 1810 in Maryland.  Ellender, if she is Mary’s mother, was also likely born between 1801 and 1810 in Brook County, Virginia.

Thomas Stone had three children, all born in Maryland, according to the Wikipedia:

• Margaret (1771 – 1809)
• Mildred (1773 – 1837)
• Fredrik (1774 – 1793)

Either James or Ellender must have been Thomas Stone’s grandchild if Mary was his great-granddaughter. Neither could have been Fredrik’s child, since he died in 1793. I have not found a well-documented source for the spouses and children of Margaret or Mildred, though it is commonly stated in public trees that Mildred married Travers Daniels and that Margaret was the second wife of John Moncure Daniel, both of Stafford County, Virginia.

The Society of the Descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, a lineage society, has more information in an article about Thomas Stone.

They also have an Applying for Membership page that discusses multiple sources documenting descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.  It’s likely one of these sources would be able to tell you who Thomas Stone’s grandchildren were and whether James or Ellender was one of them.

Jim also wonders if C J Dawes could possibly be Mary’s sister.  Or is it more likely that she is a sister-in-law?  I address that particular question on our new blog Ancestry Reference Desk in the Case Study: Sister or Sister-in-law?

Happy Searching!

Ancestry Anne

Over the past year, we have been working with a wide range of ancestry.com members, from some of our most experienced members to relative newcomers. We’ve had a lot of help (including over 10,000 responses to the preview we published in April: Preview of Changes to Ancestry.com Search).
Based on this feedback, we’ve been making some changes to the forms over the past months, and this week we’re beginning to roll out one of the most significant changes.

Really new to search?

We’ve created a tutorial on YouTube, How to Search for Historical Records on Ancestry.com to help those of you who are new genealogy searching.

What’s changed?

Previously, we’ve asked you to enter the name of the person you’re looking for, together with the birth and death dates and locations.

One of the requests we’ve had is for location to be more flexible – perhaps you don’t know where your grandparents were born in 1905, but do know they lived in Kentucky in 1960.

So we’ve added a single box that asks for any “place your ancestor might have lived”, and which searches our records for any life events that match that location, including birth, residence, marriage, military service and death.

Most importantly, in our tests with volunteer members, we found that in a number of cases, this change enabled us to surface relevant records higher in our results than was possible before.

Of course, you can still specify birth and death places by clicking on “Add an event”. In fact, these links give you a much more flexible way to add in any of the details you know about the life events or relationships of the person you’re looking for. We’ve tried to make it a little bit easier to enter as much or as little as you know.

Estimated birth year

To search the right collections, we need to know roughly the period of time in which your person was alive. To help us find the most likely records for a person, enter the approximate birth year, or click on “Calculate it” to make an educated guess if you’re not sure.

Show advanced and clear form

The links for advanced search and clear form are now located at the bottom of the form next to the Search button.

Looking for Old Search?

Old search is still there. Go to the search homepage : http://search.ancestry.com/search. Under the navigation bar on the right, you’ll see a link, “Go to Old Search”. Click on this, and you’ll be back on the Old Search form.

Happy Searching!

You’ll find we’ve modifed the search forms just a bit to make entering that information just a bit easier.

The updated form may not look that different, but the difference is all in the “Add an Event”:

Click on “Add an Event” and you will see a list of other events you can quickly add to your search. These events aren’t cluttering up the form if you don’t need them, but when you do want to use them in a search, they are just a click away.

Category and Subcategory Forms

You’ll also notice some changes on category and subcategory forms.

Previously when you looked at the Birth, Marriage and Death Category the search form was a bit long and even in advanced didn’t give you the granularity around dates that many researchers would like to have.

So we tightened up the form, and where we’ve got it indexed, we allow you to do searches with days and months instead of just years:

Data Collection Search Forms

Over the last couple of years talking to our members on the boards, blogs and at conferences, one of the most requested changes to new search was specifically in the Social Security Death Index. You wanted to be able to search by Day Month and Year. You now can, in either simple or advanced mode:

Any Event

You may have noticed the “Any Event” option on some of these forms. Sometimes you don’t know for sure exactly how the event was listed. If you enter a year or location into an “Any Event” search field, we will look for any event that is about person you are searching for: birth, death, military, you name it.

As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts about the forms.

Happy Searching!

We are working on resolving it as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your patience.

Update: The issue has been resolved, links and search on these data collections should be working normally now.

Anne Mitchell

This week, we’ve launched the first of these changes to the forms, which provides some new ways to enter details of family members into your search.

There are two main differences:

1. We’ve split the names from just one name box into two, supporting first name and last name.  This can be really important if you’re searching for a marriage record and don’t know the maiden name of the spouse.
2. We’ve added in the ability to simply add more relationships based on what you know, for example if you know multiple siblings – this helps to quickly create a really powerful search query.

One more thing. If you are using advanced search we’ll also allow you to select exact for either the first or last name of a mother or a father.

To find this, you need to click the “Tell us more to get better results” link at the bottom of the search form

If you click on that link, you will see under “Lived In (Residence) and Marriage Info, the Family Member section:

You will see that you can choose from Father, Mother, Spouse, Child or Sibling. To add more than one, click the “Add Row” box.

If you are in advanced search, you also can choose Exact Only on Father or Mother. Remember if you choose exact only, the record must have that value — so if a record doesn’t have a Father in it and you choose it as exact, then we won’t return it.

You will also find this update on all family member areas on category and data collection forms.
Vital Records

Vital Records often have wonderful relationship data in them — specifying family members in your search query will help us narrow down the results we give you.

Lets say you have one of those common ancestor names, William Smith, and you are trying to find out who he married. You start at the Birth, Marriage and Death form and you are in the advanced form, because you like to take advantage of our name filters.

You enter William as a first name, and set the filters to “exact, phonetic, similiar and initials” because you know William has a lot of variations.

You enter Smith as a last name, and set the filters to “exact, phonetic, and similiar”.

You also know that Williams father was named John and his mother’s name was Mary. So you scroll down to where you enter Family Members and enter that information. I recommend that you do not start with exact, you never know which pieces of information are recorded or indexed for family members and it’s a good idea to start with using this information as a way for us to rank records instead of excluding records.

Press “Search” and you’ll see records from everywhere, and over 800,000!

It’s a good time to refine your search and take advantage of our location filter. Press “r” on your keyboard for “refine search”, and let’s say you know William was probably married in Ohio..use the type ahead and start typing ohio:

Select Ohio, USA, then click on “Use default settings” and choose one of the filters, say “Restrict to this place exactly” and perform your search.

Now you have 83 records to look at, which is probably easier to handle. And if you want to drill down to Marriage records, click on the “Marriage & Divorce” link on the right and that is what we shall select for you to look at.

One important caveat here

When we used to search family members, we didn’t search last names, just first and middle names. So we are in the process of indexing all the family member last names on the site. We have over 4 billion records, so it may take us a week or two to get caught up. So if you type in a last name and choose exact and get no results, it means we haven’t indexed family member last names on that collection yet. I’ll let you know when we are caught up.

Happy Searching!

We appreciate your patience.

Earlier Tony Macklin announced that we will be launching a tour to give you a preview of changes to Ancestry.com search.

Yesterday, I told you about our name filters which is one of our new filters we are launching to help you create better searches. Today, I’ll continue with place filters.

This option will be available on any text box in new search when you are in advanced mode. If you don’t choose a place from our type ahead, you will see the following options:

If you use “Exact matches only” you will default to “Restrict to this place exactly” and will the same as it has before.

The interesting options for place filters happens, when you choose a location from our place type ahead.

Filters options when you use the place type ahead

When you choose a place from the type ahead, this allows us to not only quickly identify that place in our record sets, but it also lets us make use of other useful information that we know about that place. If it’s a county, we now what state it is in and we know what the adjacent counties are.

So if you were to choose Appomattox County, Virginia, USA as a birth location, we know it is in Virginia and the counties adjacent to Appomattox are Amherst, Nelson, Buckingham, Prince Edward, Charlotte, and Campbell. And we know the states adjacent to Virginia, USA are Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. This allows us to create place filters that will enhance your search.

So once you choose Appomattox County, Virginia, USA, you will not only have the default settings and exact match available to you, you’ll be able to search Appomattox County and any adjacent county. Or restrict your searches to records that at least have birth locations in Virginia. Or Virginia and the adjacent states.

So how do place filters work

Let’s say you choose Oakland, California, USA as a birth location. You will see the following filters under the birth location search box:

You know the person you are searching for was born in Oakland, Alameda, California, USA, so you apply the filter “Restrict to this place exactly”.

This choice means the record must have exactly the same place, as the place you choose. If you have chosen Oakland, Alameda, California, USA for a birth place, but the record has a birth place of Alameda, California, USA then the record will not be included in your result set. So if you aren’t finding what you are looking for, you might try selecting “Restrict to this county” or “Restrict to this county/adjacent counties”.

Just because you know where something happened, doesn’t mean that is where it was recorded or how it was recorded in the record. The ability to adjust the scope of your search, will aid you in locating those hard to find records.

How each filter works

• Default settings: If you choose default settings, there will be no filter applied. Records that match exactly what you chose get the most points; records that partially match the location you choose get some points, records that are adjacent to your chosen location get fewer points and if there is no match, no points. These points are then added to other points we gave this record based on the information you gave us and then they are used to rank that records against other records in your result set.
• Restrict to this place exactly: If you choose this, then the record must have exactly the same place, as the place you choose. If you have chosen Oakland, California, USA for a birth place, but the record has a birth place of Alameda, California, USA then the record will not be included in your result set.
• Restrict to this county:If you choose “Restrict to this county”, and you have chosen Oakland, California, USA for a birth place, and the record has a birth place of “Alameda, California, USA” this will be considered a match, and the record can be included in the result set. If the record had Fruitvale, Alameda, California, USA as the location, it would also be included, because you chose to restrict at the county level. But because it’s not an exact match, this result would not rank as high in your result set.
• Restrict to this county/adjacent counties: Sometimes the closest court house was in the next county, not in the county where your ancestor resided, and they may have recorded an event there. By choosing this option, we not only will match the county you’ve given us, but the counties that are currently adjacent to it. And state lines do not make a difference here. If the county is adjacent, we search it and we match it.
• Restrict to this state: This works just like restrict to this county, except at the state level. If you have chosen Oakland, California, USA for a birth location, we will match any record that has a birth location in California. However, if the county or city matches, the result will appear higher in the result list.
• Restrict to this state/adjacent state: This works like the county/adjacent county filter except at the state level.
• Restrict to this country This works like the county or state filter, except at the country level.

What if I choose a county in England? What filters will I see?

Filters are based upon the location you have chosen. If you choose a county in England, we will allow you to filter at the county, country or the UK level. Filters are adjusted to match the country you are in.

Not a sticky option, except for “Match all terms exactly”
Because each filter set is dependent on the location you have chosen, this option can not be sticky unless you choose “Match all terms exactly” which will set your filter to “Restrict to exact”

When can I try these filters?
These filters will be available sometime on Thursday.

Happy Searching!

Anne