Organized Brick Wall Battling

 

When it comes to battling brick wall ancestors, my Twelve Most Wanted project has been my way to organize the process: select one ancestor per month who has me stumped, and spend the entire month poking and prodding every scrap of information I can find on that ancestor. Eventually, though, I realized I was going to hit, well, a brick wall for the research process, itself. I had seen that inevitable sign when I closed out the year's research a couple years ago. But then, something else happened to bring in a new game changer.

That game changer was a new way of searching: using computers trained to read handwriting, applied to searches through multitudes of digitized documents, both civil and ecclesiastical. With the advent of FamilySearch.org's Full Text Search, I could see that it might be possible to find the heretofore unfindable. 

With this year's Twelve Most Wanted projects, that has held true. Granted, at some point, my luck may run out—but perhaps by then, another new development may keep me running down this brick wall ancestor track for another lap.

That's how it's been, in particular, for Simon Rinehart, my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather from Greene County, Pennsylvania. Court documents drawn up after his family's move to Perry County, Ohio, have shed quite a bit of light on his family dynamics—perhaps more than the family would have liked for people to know. Most importantly, Full Text Search teaming up with FamilySearch.org's documents from Perry County showed me the correct lineup for Simon's many children from two different marriages. That is a lot more discovered than what I had when I started this month.

Closing out this month's research project on Simon Rinehart doesn't mean that's the end of the pursuit for this brick wall ancestor's roots. I'll return to his story in a future year. When I do, I hope to focus my attention on obtaining documents from his earlier years in Greene County, Pennsylvania. That is where I believe the answers should lie for those early years when Simon lost his first wife and remarried. That will require finding documents from the earliest years of the 1800s, possibly from a local source if online collections don't include the years I'm seeking.

Every little bit we do discover gives us the fuel to power future searches. This month, while not achieving my goal at the outset of finding Simon's parents, nevertheless brought us far forward through the other discoveries outlined in the month's posts. Behind the scenes, I will continue building the descendancy charts for each of the newly-discovered Rinehart children, mainly to find DNA matches from collateral Rinehart lines. But as for further pursuits on Simon's own story, we'll need to save that for a future year. For tomorrow, it's on to another search—and this time, we'll switch to an ancestor on my father-in-law's side of the family.