Take walls down one brick at a time

Smashing into a brick wall can be painful whether with your body, car, or in your genealogical research. Hitting a brick wall in genealogy means you cannot seem to advance further with your research. You may feel you’ve tried everywhere and the information you need just doesn’t exist.

But don’t give up just yet. There are several things you can try when you’ve been repeatedly smashing your head against the genealogical wall for weeks, months, or even years.

First, take a good break. Sometimes we truly cannot see the forest for the trees. When you focus exclusively on one problem for a long time you often can’t see what you’ve really got.

Accountants talk about the “penny off” in their figures which they can’t locate. If they leave it a few days and return the error jumps out at them. The same thing is true of authors who miss errors in their writing because they are so familiar with the material they simply read what they think is there not what is actually on the paper in front of them.

In genealogy we do the same thing. Our eyes skim quickly over the material we’ve gathered without actually seeing it. Put the material aside for a time long enough that you will need to read it carefully again to refresh your memory. In the meantime you can pursue another family line.

Once you return to your brick wall, re-read everything very slowly and carefully. Often you may “find” an ignored source, one you neglected to follow up on or never completed. It’s easy to miss these clues in genealogy or to get sidetracked from researching with a source and forget about it completely.

The more we do the more likely it is we’ll skip something. For example, did you check all the children of an ancestor? Did you check the second page of the census? Did you look at land records or historic newspapers? There are so many sources that it is easy to miss one or more.

My final tip is that you start from scratch (don’t panic) by revisiting some of the sources you did at the beginning of your research to determine if you got all the information available. When we first start researching it is very easy to think something isn’t important.

I once saw a researcher walk away from some solid clues. He found his ancestor in a city directory living in a house with other people. He wrote down only his ancestor’s address but neglected to record the other people. Could they possibly have been family members? Could their descendants have material on the man’s ancestor?

If the researcher hit a brick wall would he retrace his steps and follow up on this clue or would he totally forget it existed?

Whatever you do never lose hope that you can’t continue to chip away at your brick wall. There often is more information available and in time you will find it.

Nancy Battick is a Dover-Foxcroft native who has researched genealogy for over 30 years. She is past president of the Maine Genealogical Society, author of several genealogical articles and co-transcribed the Vital Records of Dover-Foxcroft. Nancy holds a MA in History from UM and lives in DF with her husband, Jack, another avid genealogist. You can contact Nancy at nbattick@roadrunner.com.