My research is from present to 100 yrs. ago is there anyone or site that specializes in this?

+2 votes
246 views
in WikiTree Help by Paul Sexton G2G Crew (630 points)
I started with family trees in other sites. I have a tree in family search of what I believe of around 500 descendents. Though the mistakes that I have ran across now makr me question most of them. I'm trying to figure out the best way to start without making to many mistakes. I've seen a marriage that was flip-flopped and the maiden name became the given name and vice-verca. The reason I wanted to start from the beginning back. Is to hopefully catch some mistakes and right them before I move on up the tree. Is this the wrong way to go about it? Maybe I'm thinking about this backwards. I'm not sure. I just wanted to get a little input. To hopefully make my entries an asset. Not a problem.

3 Answers

+6 votes
 
Best answer
Paul, I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here, but my gut reaction is that we all specialized in our recent genealogy initially -- i.e. starting by profiling ourselves, our parents, our grandparents, etc., and perhaps branching out horizontally to spouses and siblings and their relatives.  But with an arbitrary restriction of 100 years, you would have to compile data on a lot of still-living people, and you would quickly run out of info that would be appropriate for a genealogy site, or even appropriate to post on the web.  It does get more difficult to find info and sources the farther back you go, but that's the basic challenge.  If I'm just not understanding what you're trying to accomplish, please post again and clarify.
by Dennis Barton G2G6 Pilot (556k points)
selected by Gaile Connolly
Paul, the advice provided by Dennis is so important, even though it doesn't provide any of the persons or sites you requested, that I would rather add that answer as a comment here than write it as a separate answer.

There are several sites that specialize in this.  They generally charge a fee and offer to provide all sorts of information about living people - contact information (addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) as well as names of family members, whether the person has ever been arrested, and all sorts of other information - it's kind of like a cyber-private-detective service.  They tend to be at the top of the google results when you enter a person's name in the search window.  Since they are so easy to find, I'm not going to try to name any of them here, but I strongly recommend against you attempting to use them to do any kind of genealogy research.
+1 vote
Paul, near the lower right corner of every profile is a Research button.  (You'll need to log in again with your wikitree ID and Password.).

You'll be amazed what you can find through it-- especially via familysearch.org (free but requires registration), one of the options.
by Jillaine Smith G2G6 Pilot (909k points)

For example, here's an index entry for your dad's birth:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QKHG-FRNM

And here's a birth entry for your paternal grandfather:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FWJ7-87G

And here is your grandfather as a 7-year-old with his parents and many siblings in 1900:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-D4B9-CCG?i=12&cc=1325221&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AM943-6LK

I'll try to make this short. The reason I asked this question. I have more family tree's than I can count making my way to Wiki Tre. Because of the mistakes I have found. One family has a different wife for a man than our family has depending on whos right or wrong it will change a lot more than that one. One more is how many ways can you spell Isaah. Six that I have with 4 different wives and around 30 children but all 6 Isaah's have the same mother and father. I'm more confused than when I started. Am I asking to many questions?
  • When you have discrepancies across multiple family trees, you resolve them through careful analysis of the sources.  
  • Spelling variations abound-- especially pre-100 years ago an and going back from there. Hence, wikitree's principle of using their convention, not ours: how did the person/family spell their name during their lifetime, according to the records from that time period?
  • if you're seeing six wives and 30 children, chances are you're seeing profiles that were subject of multiple merges where the wives and children haven't yet been merged. When wikitree first got going, it placed no limits on gedcom uploads and did not yet have the features for preventing duplicates that it now has. We're all still dealing with the impact of that.
+2 votes
I commend you (and welcome you) for trying to create an accurate tree.  The only way to do that is through using sources--some of which may not be on the Internet.  When you have gathered your sources, you must then analyze them.

For example, could a man have six wives and 20 children?  Yes, of course, he could.  In past centuries most families, esp. in the Americas, lived on farms and needed big families.  Many wives died in child birth or shortly thereafter, which necessitated remarriage.

But did this particular man have six wives and 20 children?  That requires analysis of the sources and some logic.  If the births of all the children are laid out, are there problems (children born several months apart, birth date of the child of one wife falling between to of another)?  If so, multiple individuals may have been conflated.  Was a man NOT Mormon and married to two living wives at the same time?  Think conflation.

By laying out all the known facts from census, birth, death, marriage, and probate records (among others) and looking at the pattern(s), you can tease out some of these conflations.

I wouldn't worry too much about whether the name was recorded as Isaah, Isaiah, Isaia, etc.  At a time when few were literate scribes wrote what they heard.  I've even seen some cases where the same individual in the early 18th century signed his own name differently at different times.

Patterns are more important.
by Kathy Rabenstein G2G6 Pilot (320k points)

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