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Difficult Searches
Home » Genealogy » Genealogy - Difficult Searches » Difficult SearchesPosted by Your Guide on July 6, 2006 9:32 PM
There's no easy way to your goal when you find yourself in a difficult family history search. Diligence and creative thinking are the only way to get past a seeming dead end. There is a temptation to accept the dead end as final and to move along to another branch of your family. But if you plow through, stop and evaluate what you have and consider what might have happened, you may just find the thread that helps you track down a "hidden" ancestor.
The difficult search for our women ancestors is common to every family history researcher. Not only did women marry and change their names, but it was heartbreakingly common for young, healthy women to die in child birth or while caring for sick family members.
Native Americans have been shuffled from place to place, but also lived a nomadic existence moving with the seasons and following the sources of food, shelter and clothing that helped them survive. While they struggled to maintain their lives, keeping written records of births, deaths, and marriages was not important.
African Americans and those that research their lives are all too aware of how many breaks there are in the records concerning them. It seems apparent that searching for our African American ancestors would be difficult. But add to that the fact that so many slaves were killed and no record kept of their death, that a few escaped and ran away to other parts of the country, or were just left to die as they became too old to work and you'll only have scratched the surface of African American genealogical research.
These challenges are just a few of the difficult searches that frustrate, yet energize us to keep looking, hoping to find that one small detail that will lead to the next step on the trail of our family history.
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- Difficult Searches
- Searching for your female ancestors
- Native American Ancestors
- African American Ancestors