Four Things I’m Doing To Break My Brick Wall
I’ve been researching my family tree since I was a teen, I did take a hiatus while my children were growing up, but I’ve been hot on the trail ever since. I like to say I work almost 24/7 on my genealogy, so I think I’ve more than made up for the years that I stopped to raise my children.
I have two brick walls in my research: my paternal grandfather, Harold, who was born illegitimate, and my mom’s maternal grandfather, William Beaton (Willie Beaton), who was adopted. My search for William started around 2008 or maybe even earlier than that. My research goal didn’t start out to find his parents, but that’s where I’ve become stuck. I have made significant gains over all these years of learning about him, but I just haven’t been able to get any further in the tree. So the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking, what can I do to get past this brick wall?
So I thought of four things that I’m going to do to help me with my brick wall, and I wanted to share them with you. Even if it doesn’t help my research, I’m hoping they might help you.
- Check your correspondence. If you’ve been searching a long time too then you have correspondence. Hopefully, you’ve done a good job of keeping your correspondence organized. I’m not sure mine is the best but I have a folder called; Genealogy > Correspondence> Surname. So all correspondence about the Beaton family for instance is kept in the Beaton folder.
Because I’ve been collecting correspondence about the Beaton family for such a long time. Could I have an email that didn’t make sense when I got it, but now it might help with my research?
2. Check your notes. Similar to the correspondence, I keep all my research notebooks. I like the notebooks divided into sections because they have always been great for separating family lines. So the plan is to search each notebook with the same idea. Have I found clues about the Beaton family that I didn’t understand the meaning of?
3. Check your Shoebox. I have an Ancestry account, and you might too. When was the last time you checked what you’d stashed away in your shoebox? Again it’s looking at the records that may not have connected the dots when you found them but might make perfect sense now.
4. Check your DNA matches. In my case, I’ve tested every one of my mom’s siblings, and if they weren’t alive, then I’ve tested one or all of their children, and I’ve tested some of them at the various DNA testing sites. If I haven’t tested them, I’ve at least transferred their raw data.
But sometimes, I feel like I might have too much information. Well, maybe not too much, but sometimes it’s easy to go from test person to test person and get bogged down.
So what I’m doing now is systematically going through each person’s test results and just focusing on each individual. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done this before, but I’m reviewing to see if my conclusions are solid, and I want to check the interconnections between matches.
One of the tools I like to use is the “What are the Odds” tool at DNA Painter. So for my mom and each of the siblings, I’m plotting the close matches that each has and seeing if a particular relationship is worth pursuing. In this example (a portion of the WATO chart) below, I’ve plotted the known connection of my DNA matches to their common ancestor then I put a hypothesis for each of the tested members of my family. The hypothesis is where my mom, aunt, or uncle might fit in the tree. The WATO tool calculates the odds of each of the potential relationships. The higher the score, the better the odds and the more likely the relationship.
With the high score possibilities, I research further to see if I could find additional information to add to the tree. Often the additional information can help me understand where some of the other more distant DNA matches fit in. Then I’ll rerun the hypothesis to see if the scores have changed and carry on with my research.
I’m running these reports for each of my aunt’s and uncle’s to see if I get different results. By doing this, I may identify a family line where I need to look more seriously. If no one has tested in that family line, do additional work to identify descendants for targeted testing. For now, I continue to build the trees of my DNA matches.
I’m also looking for a family that might have lived in the Kingston, Ontario area (where my great grandfather said he was born), but at this point, I don’t know if William was an orphan in Canada or in England. If he was a British Home Child, I haven’t discovered that yet. I can only go on the information I have and do some speculating as to what that information is telling me. The DNA matches that the family has, point to his family being from Oxfordshire, England but that’s as much as I know other than William’s documentation seems to point to him being born in Ontario. So whether he or his parents were from Oxfordshire, England, and then immigrated to Canada is the question.
I have found a possible couple that connects the surnames that appear to be of interest through my DNA matches. The Bayliss family and the Walden Family. The couple is Walter Walden (1835) and his wife Eliza Baylis (1852). Walter and Eliza were born in Oxfordshire, England, and they married in 1872, which is around when Willie appears to have been born. But the family disappears, and I can’t locate them after they get married, and I can find no birth record for Willie.
Walter appears to be a bit of a “badass” as he regularly was in trouble with the law. But as you can see in this article, he states that he is getting married and emigrating. So did the family emigrate? If so, where to? I’ve checked in Australia and Canada and so far haven’t located them.
But as is usual when dealing with Willie, when I have a good lead that could perhaps mean something, the trail goes cold. So I will continue looking on other sites or via other DNA connections and see if I can pick the trail up again.
Happy hunting.
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