Caution in Use of Resources

Below is an excerpt I took from the latest newsletter from Pat
Gooldy, who runs Ye Old Genealogy Shoppe.  She is located in Indiana and
has few books on Mexico, but I love reading her newsletters because she always
has such good advice.  In the excerpt below, she is talking about
researching her own and her husband's relatives in some of the Eastern
states.  As we find in Mexico, she found that many people in
a community had the same names due to the habit of naming sons after fathers,
uncles, etc. Also, she found that men often married women with the same first
name, as we have found in Mexico.  Do we really have the right Jose x,
married to our Maria x, of approximately the same ages, who were from our
locality and not another couple also from there or who moved there? Often after
tedious transcribing and comparisons, I find that I was following the wrong
thread.

Emilie Garcia

Port Orchard, WA
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In genealogy
contemporary sources arent yours. They are the sources of your ancestors
available contemporaneously to him.

This is where you
look for the pieces that tell you who he was not just that he
was. Therein lay the stories of these men
or women you call kin. Thank heavens for
the modern resources and the databases that bring an ever clearer picture to you
of your ancestors and therefore, of yourself.

 However, a word of caution! Not every John Smith in the records of Maine
is YOUR John Smith. You are weaving a
tapestry of a mans life. Make sure all
your threads belong to the one that is your ancestor. Most towns, even back then, had more than one
man with the same name. I once helped a
lady research a county in Indiana that had four Percifield relatives,
all brothers, who lived at Four Corners, so
named because it was the place where the sections of land that the boys had
purchased met. Each one of the four boys
had at least four sons and all of them gave to the boys the names of himself and
his three brothers. Cant you imagine what
it was like when a lady stepped to the door of her cabin and yelled, Gilbert
Percifield, you get over to this cabin right now! Most of the time she got at least four, and
sometimes all five, of them at her doorstep in minutes. [Would be kind of nice, wouldnt it? Today you count the cars in the driveway
before you yell for anyone! And even then
you are lucky if anyone answers, never mind comes a-running!]

 The Percifield marriages proved to be
daunting. Their county has had some
record destruction so the marriages are thought not to be complete. Even at that all the first generation married
and most of the second generation married.
There were plenty of Gilbert Percifield marriage records in the
courthouse records. The only trouble was
six of them married ladies named Elizabeth!
Think that was not a can of worms?
Straightening out that mess was a big job. But how could we trace the brides family if we
did not know which Elizabeth was ours? Turns out, we think he was one of the Gilbert
Percifields that had been married in another county before they moved
there. Finally found that record, but a
lingering doubt will always be there as to whether we really did get the right
Elizabeth!