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Researching Female Ancestors? You Can Overcome Those Research Roadblocks!
Trouble researching female ancestors? Learn how to find those elusive females in your family tree with these genealogy research strategies. Her name is Joanna Barrett. Or is it? Is Barrett her maiden name or a married name? If a married name, is it from a first or second marriage? All I really know before Joanna ended up in Surry County, North Carolina, is that she was born in Ireland and had a daughter – also named Joanna – in America. Joanna is a brick wall female ancestor. We all have brick wall ancestors, and many of those brick walls represent female ancestors. While you might want to throw your hands…
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Tracing Female Ancestors Through A Child’s Records
Tracking down our female ancestors requires thinking “outside the box”. Always focusing on her may not yield the desired results. By taking our focus off of our female ancestor, we can be sure of exhausting all possibilities of finding her in the records. We’ve discussed shifting our focus to your elusive female ancestor’s children in a previous post. [Go ahead and click over to read it. I’ll wait.] Now that you are convinced of the need to shift your focus off of the female ancestor you are researching, let’s take a closer look at this in action. Tracing Female Ancestors Through A Child’s Records We are starting with John White…
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Searching for Your Female Ancestors
Thank you for your response! Knowing what you are struggling with in your genealogy research ensure I create future posts and information to make you more successful in your genealogy research. Yes, those female ancestors can be difficult to research! After all, women did not always create many of their own records. Add to that a name change at marriage and your female ancestor can become quite elusive. Take a moment and enjoy these posts about finding female ancestors already on the blog:
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How To Use Pre-1850 Census Records to Find Your Female Ancestors
Genealogy researchers can struggle to find female ancestors in pre-1850 census records. We are familiar with the US census records, and they are often some of the first records we search when looking at a family line. In those early census records, we pay more attention to the male ancestors listed. We (you can read that as “I”) can fail to see our female ancestors in these records. I used to dread the point in my census research when my ancestors preceded the 1850 U.S. census. (The truth is, I still do sometimes!) I especially dreaded those pre-1850 census records when I researched anyone other than the head of household.…