Finding the Road Map

 

Tracing the line of a family surname can be challenging, as those of us wrestling with "brick wall" ancestors can attest. This month, as I work on the first goal of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, I am chasing after a colonial woman with the maiden name of Carter—a surname common enough to possibly lead me astray. However, I am also fortunate enough that this particular Carter line includes some notables from the colonial era in a region rich in history—and historic preservation. Finding the "road map" to lead me through the Carter generations may be easier than I thought.

Of course, the question might be, why find a "road map" for genealogy at all? Just do the work. Yet, pushing back to an era devoid of the common types of documents we might rely on for more recent family research—birth certificates, death certificates, even census records or obituaries for women—it sometimes seems the search would be easier if we already knew the father's name. And that is precisely what we aren't sure of. Yet.

Thankfully, in our digitized age, we stand a better chance of locating records, thanks to trailblazers who've already done the research and shared their work. We have libraries full of published genealogies—think the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana—with multiple volumes already scanned and put online for anyone to use. The same goes for independent organizations like Internet Archive where, once a book has aged beyond copyright and is in the public domain, a quick search can bring us right to the front page—or deep inside, if we use the website's own search capabilities.

Then, too, subscription services like Ancestry.com or MyHeritage have acquired digitized volumes for their own customers' use. In seeking information on my fourth great-grandmother Margaret Chew Carter, wife of Zachariah Taliaferro, several hints at Ancestry provided citations in books and journal articles.

Besides that, despite the common state of a surname like Carter, I discovered that doing a simple Google search on Margaret's maiden name led me to several resources I would otherwise not have known about. For instance, as part of the Zachariah Taliaferro family records donated to the Clemson University Library Special Collections and Archives, there is a biographical statement which includes Margaret by name. And if I repeat that Google search while specifying one website—limiting my search to, say, "Internet Archive"—it leads me to mentions of her name in several books written in the early 1900s.

Finding the road map, in Margaret's case, is not necessarily the problem. There are resources out there. But once I find them, the question becomes: are they reliable? We've already mentioned the entry in one book, asserting Margaret's relationship to a well-known Carter man who preceded her by one or more generations, "King" Carter. I've seen that claim repeated in other resources. But is it true?

That's a question I'll need to answer for myself. But in the meantime, it points us to another question to consider: once we find a family history road map, how can we know that resource is reliable? Let's take a look tomorrow at a couple examples I've found which give me pause—and some thoughts on how to handle that likelihood.