Is that a Q or a 2?

You finally find your ancestor and you pull up the original document online but now ... you can't read it!  Qs look like 2s and is that an H or an A?  It's impossible to find your ancestor when the interpreter spells the name wrong.  I found some Reese's listed in census as Ruse. This diagram may help you but don't forget to search for different variations of the name ... like Reese, Rees, Rhys, Russ, Reed, Rese, Rice, etc.  I hope you are endowed with extreme patience:

Naming the Children

Do you want to know one of the things that turns a genealogist's hair gray? Decades of an area in a state where the men have the same names due to traditional naming conventions.

The act of naming your children was sometimes followed as a strict rule by European-based families.  For example:

Irish Naming Conventions

The 1st son was usually named after the father's father

The 2nd son was usually named after the mother's father

The 3rd son was usually named after the father

The 4th son was usually named after the father's eldest brother

The 5th son was usually named after the mother's eldest brother

The 1st daughter was usually named after the mother's mother

The 2nd daughter was usually named after the father's mother

The 3rd daughter was usually named after the mother

The 4th daughter was usually named after the mother's eldest sister

The 5th daughter was usually named after the father's eldest sister

This meant that if brothers lived in close proximity all their lives, their sons and daughters might all have the same names and be close in age.  This sometimes help if you know a person is the first born and you want to find the father but it creates a bit of a mess.

A Lifetime of Research

When I was a young girl, a family member I never met sent my mother a package of papers.  On each page was a family profile, moving back in time for generations.  I was captivated and locked in from moment one hoping to help add some information on my branch of the family.  

Back then there was no internet, I didn't have a computer, it was the era of big tube television sets with green screens. At first the only information I could gather was by interviewing other family members.  When I could drive, I went into Philadelphia to the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania on Chestnut Street and sat for hours reading dusty old books and looking through reel after reel of microfiche.  The easiest pathway was through census records, which back as far as 1850 included the names of family members, birth states, occupations, and sometimes even street addresses.  Before 1850 only the male (or female if lone head of household) was listed and then the grid only allowed for the number of family members in age groups.  Now, the census records are online, as well as copies of historical books, and access to other peoples research. My favorite site is Ancestry.com, where I am building a tree.  I also have a website for tracking both mom and dad's lines ... Plotsky Online.

Mom's family came from England & Ireland to Maine and St. Stephen's, New Brunswick, Canada to New York to New Jersey to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  

Dad's family came from Wales & Ireland to Virginia to North Carolina to South Carolina to Georgia and then back to North Carolina.  In 1933 dad, after graduating from North Carolina State, came North to take a job with mom's father (Percy Love), a supervisor in a paper mill in Philadelphia.  He boarded with mom's family and the rest is history, well, my history anyway!

The family member who enriched my life with this hobby, is Priscilla.  My business life and trying to take care of a family took up so much time there was very little left to indulge in genealogy research, so over the years I worked my trees in spurts.  Through Priscilla's data, my mother's line goes back to the Mayflower (ancestor is Stephen Hopkins), and on into Europe, all the way to the crusades in one line.  But, I'm stumped with my father's research at my great-great grandfather's level.  I think I know who it is but can't prove it with records.

I want to use this blog to tell stories and work through some assumptions ... the tree data is on my website but it's the life of the individual that fascinates me.  This is also the hardest information to find unless you get back far enough that your relative is mentioned in historical books.

Priscilla is the true genealogist and she writes articles for the The Maine Genealogist, where her data has to be proven and documented properly before it can be published.