HORRIBLE GENEALOGY FACTS

Unless descended from those of noble birth -- meaning rich landowners -- genealogy experts agree that it's virtually impossible to trace the lineage of most ordinary people back more than 300-450 years.

1. Actually, a verifiable lineage of 300-450 years is beyond the reach of most of us. Don't be surprised or disappointed if you can't even establish a verifiable lineage of 200 years. Everyone has missing links in their ancestry and it's OK to fudge a link between two verifiable people. Obviously the missing link person had to exist!

2. Before governments made registration of births, marriages and deaths compulsory at various dates in the 1880s, records of these events were kept by the parish churches. If your ancestors buried their dead, didn't believe in baptism and preferred to skip over a broom rather than marry in front of a priest or clergyman, then your verifiable lineage is going to be shorter than most.

3. Many of these old parish records were destroyed by fire or vermin long before the Public Records Offices came into being, and not even the Public Records Offices were safe. In Dublin, 1922, one year after independence from England, the Irish Republicans fought among themselves and at Four Courts they used 817 parish registers and irreplaceable manuscripts documenting the history of Ireland to barricade the windows and all documents ended up in flames. If records of your Irish descendants were among these ashes, then your recorded lineage may end abruptly in 1922.

4. In England, registration of parish births, marriages and deaths started about 1538 and were made compulsory by an Act of parliament in 1836. Before 1538, ordinary people were treated like livestock -- in William the Conqueror's Domesday Book of 1085, domestic animals and serfs (farm laborers) were enumerated along with every wood, meadow and cornfield -- but if your ancestors are English then you have excellent chances of having a longer genealogical record than most.

5. In Scotland, registration of parish births, marriages and deaths started about 1700, much later than in England, and were not made compulsory by an Act of parliament until 1855. Because Scottish records prior to 1700 are rare, many myths have arisen about ancient Scottish ancestry.

6. In Ireland, the keeping of parish records started about 1634 by the Protestant Church of Ireland which also included Catholic records. The Public Record Office of Ireland was established in 1867, much later than Scotland and England, and by a quirk of fate 600 parishes were allowed to keep their records and in doing so saved them from the 1922 Four Courts Fire. You'll need the proverbial luck of the Irish to trace your Irish ancestors back to 1634!

7. In Germany, you need to know whether your ancestors were Catholic or Protestant and this is difficult to ascertain because for two hundred years -- from the Reformation of the 16th century to the Counter-Reformation of the 18th century -- people switched from Catholic to Protestant and back again depending upon who was in power. Generally, southern Germany was Catholic and kept parish records from about 1550 which is as good as England's record. By 1875, registration of births, deaths and marriages became compulsory, but despite the fact that duplicates were supposed to be sent to a central body, few were. If your ancestors were German, you need to check out each town's parish records and this is bad luck if old Fritz was born in one place, married in another and died somewhere else!

8. As far as parish records go, there are more deaths registered than births which is hardly surprising in view of the fact that poverty, malnutrition and terrible diseases ended the lives of many babies before their first birthday. Parents who held off baptism may have been too involved with a subsequent pregnancy to get around to registering those babies that did survive their first year. Under these circumstances, it is very difficult to ascertain the parentage of someone who, according to parish baptism registers, doesn't exist.

9. Parish registers were often disrupted during wars, famines or other catastrophes -- of which there were many before the 1800s -- and key people in our ancestries are often missing from the parishes in which they lived. missing links are so common and infuriating that the only way to deal with them is to "fudge" the record because that person, obviously, must have existed.

10. Parish records, along common patriarchal standards, often omit female details. A baptismal record, for instance, may contain only the father's name (when that man, quite probably, was not even the child's DNA father). A marriage record may only contain the parentage of the groom. And a death record may only contain details of the male parent of the deceased. For women interested in mitochondrial research -- tracing the mother of one's mother's mother, etc -- these omissions are infuriating.

11. Parish records occasionally recorded details of births, marriages and deaths of parishioners that took place elsewhere, so there will be two records of these events in two parishes. If either or both of the parish clerks made an error in recording the correct names, dates and places then you have a nightmare determining if those records are of one person or two. Of course, with bigamy being so widely practiced in those days these confusing double records may have been created deliberately by the cad involved.

12. Commonly, to ensure continuation of a family first name, people once named two or more children with the same first name -- probably expecting one or two of them to die. When two children named "Charles" for instance are born in the same year, to the same parents, one in January and the other in December, you are faced with a particularly difficult situation.

13. Finally, and appropriately at this number, comes the worst possible horrible fact of genealogical research and the one that's solely responsible for the creation of this website. Spelling!

(a) Your ancestors can have last names with a multiplicity of spellings, some within the same family unit. As a gross expression, for instance, John and Mary Smith can have children registered as Thomas Smythe, Charles Schmidt, Anne Smitt, Susan Samith and Roger Smiff according to the whim of the clerk recording their records. The parents don't notice because they're illiterate.

(b) Because second and third marriages were common -- many young women died in childbirth -- the different spelling of a surname may have been deliberate to differentiate the subsequent wife's children from the others.

(c) Because bigamy was once almost a national sport, the cads involved deliberately made various changes to their names -- but invariably always kept their initials -- in order to avoid detection.

(d) Many foreign names were Anglicized and because families -- both native and foreign -- often moved from parish to parish looking for work and lodgings their names would change according to the aural proclivities or sense of humor of the clerk registering them.

(e) Mostly, the spelling changes are just errors. Bearing in mind that most ordinary people prior to the 1800s were illiterate -- and even if they could read and write their spelling was atrocious -- it is understandable that nobody realized the mistakes that were being made by the parish clerks responsible for the written registrations. The clerks just wrote down what the name sounded like, and depending upon the accents of the people needing registration the name in its written form could be spelt in various strange ways.

(f) Also, by the time most ordinary people could read and write, they then started to change the spelling of their name to something they liked.

(g) Spelling changes are often so bizarre that you end up researching a lot of red herrings, but if you want a genealogy chart that goes beyond 150 years then you need to be very creative and patient in your research.