How do you find which of many parental candidates, all those common names, for your ancestor are the right ones?
I posted about this a while back but allow me to go into more detail. To recap, I mentioned that when recreating families with common names in the same location we notice if there are births indicating overlapping pregnancies such as the same couple seemingly having two babies within a year. We know it's possible but not likely that a woman is going to have two pregnancies in a year. We have to be careful also that we don't think an individual woman has had, say, 16 children over 40 years; it can happen but it's probably two women with the same name. House numbers and the names of Godparents and sometimes the witnesses to marriages can give us clues.
Recently on FAMILYSEARCH I linked to someone else's research that was just aweful. I'm about ready to contact FAMILYSEARCH and tell them this person's contributions to the site are sloppy, unproofed, and deceiving, but as I read it, once it's up it's up. I found he had put up whole family trees (which remain if he quits his free membership) in which he had parents of the same name and over ten children and the dates would indicate that the mother would have been giving birth for 30 years. Even if they traveled around Hungary having children, he offers no marriages, no deaths. It would take hours to check his work. AND I DO NOT LIKE IT THAT ALL THESE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN GIVEN ID NUMBERS : I DO NOT WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS OR HAVE ANY OF MY RESEARCH LINKED TO ANY OF HIS as these ID NUMBERS will then MERGE THE WORK. SOMEONE FOLLOWING MY professional standards RESEARCH WILL BE FOOLED BY HIS sloppy work!
When using FAMILYSEARCH for Hungarian/Slovak genealogy note that the red link - the "fine print" for searching the INDEX encourages you to think that the FAMILYSEARCH DATABASE of Hungarian or Slovakian church records is comprehensive, it's not. IT SHOULD SAY "The BAPTISMS are INDEXED" not that the (CHURCH) RECORDS are. (Even then there are images not available for some films for whatever reasons and though it's implied that the original film was index but then withheld or lost or some governmental privacy issue has emerged, TRY THE LOCAL ARCHIVES IN HUNGARY.) This misinformation is really sloppy on the part of LDS/ FAMILYSEARCH considering that their aim is to dominate the provision of genealogy/historical records in this world.
You need to look at the images from the film whenever available. You need to find the MARRIAGES, DEATHS, REMARRIAGES and if at all possible read/translate the notes.
Here is how I get close to the record I need without wasting hours on end though I still wish I had the time back used to get closer to the information I need.
Let's say I have reason to believe that an ancestor I'm looking for was born in a certain location; maybe it wasn't transcribed right, maybe the surname was totally screwed up by the person who originally hand wrote it, or the indexer didn't know what they were doing, It's just isn't coming up no matter how I play games with letters and so on to bring it up.
I want to get to, say, 1849 and that place on the microfilm.
By first going to the film number and then searching for ANYONE born in 1849, I get to that part of the film, which saves me time.
Alternately, going to the film number will bring up an option to see many small blackish squares. Some of them will clearly look like start pages because they have more white on them. Click on those to find where you are. It would be helpful to know on which image death collections or marriage collections within a film number start and end without even having to waste time scanning like this. Sadly the only way to do that is to scan the film since the BAPTISMALS, MARRIAGES, and DEATHS will probably not be by year but by category and then year. So if a film has 700 images, I go to 350 and see what's there. I might go to 100 and see what's there. To 550 and see what's there. I take notes for the next time I go to that film.
Consider that you could have ordered a microfilm back in the day, payed for it, waited for it, rushed to the closest Family History Library upon hearing it was in, and rolled the microfilm page by page, because the loan was only going to be for about 10 days. Yes, you have gratitude that this information is currently free. Still, you have to hone patience.
Remember to take breaks to rest your eyes, stretch, drink some fresh water or hot tea.
Once you have your film number and start scanning, write down the image number ie. image 68 or 675 as a example - to return to it later. There is a SOURCE BOX feature. I've noticed that when using my cell phone to save some of the information is not saved though it said it was. Luckily you can delete records held in SOURCE BOX.
I recreated a large family group but with a six-year gap of births. While perhaps in those six years the couple didn't have any pregnancies or went through early miscarriages, I went into the film and looked at that six years and sure enough, there was the person I was looking for - a sibling who did not come up probably because of one of the previously mentioned issues of transcription.
Go to deaths and marriages and scan each page especially if a person was a widow or widower at remarriage. Very likely there are half siblings, step siblings, or some other evidence of BLENDED FAMILIES. The reason so many people in a village collaborated with each other for childcare was that they were often interrelated!
When you have MANY candidates to be the parents of a child, some in the town of marriage, some somewhere else, you have no choice but to develop multiple family groups in order to eliminate some of them. By understanding who married, who died, and when, you'll see blended families emerge. I'm working on several surnames where this is the case. In my own family at least two marriages per person due to the deaths of women who bore many children is common.
I just translated a death record that said, "I do not know why this person died." His wife had died less than a year earlier and young. The couple had also experienced the death of one twin. I even wondered if he committed suicide! I find this to be an unusual statement, one I don't see repeated.
One of my ancestors experienced seven of her siblings and their parent's death before she married. That left her with a brother and a sister. She and her sister came to America. When she married, she married a much older recently widowed man whose first wife had seven births, with four children left to stepmother - the first she no doubt played with in the school yard.
Few women in pre-1900 Hungary lived long enough to experience menopause, most experienced repetitive childbirth throughout their adult lives and I think it wore them out.
Most widowed husbands remarried and often quickly and pragmatically.
Infant mortality was high, as many as 2 out of 3 children were orphaned before they were adults. Parents experienced the deaths of their children. Siblings experienced the death of their siblings. The priest must have been busy. Was there time for grief? Funerals were frequent. TB, smallpox, cholera, typhus, infections, broken bones, childbirth, and many diseases we have conquered or gotten control of (such as the "long illness" of mysterious cancers), were equal opportunity with no respect for status or wealth. (Go get vaccinated!)
I recently read that the Black Plague killed so many people in Europe that people started being less status-driven when it came to remarriage. That mixed the genes. (The Black Plague did not affect Central and Eastern Europe as badly as it did England.)
If you identify as a Hungarian or Hungarian-American, consider this. You are alive today because your ancestors managed to reproduce with all these threats to their lives. They lived long enough to reproduce despite plagues. They also, depending on where in Hungary they were, managed to reproduce though (estimated up to) half the population was killed by Mongols circa 1241 and then two thirds had been killed by the Ottoman Turks by 1568.
And now we have to put up with people who think some of us came from "Draconian Caves" or are "Reptile People."
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