by LaRae Free Kerr

NOTE: This column is the first of a two-part series. This column sets up the Ancestor Fishing Project and gives preliminary information for the young relatives. The second part presents the actual databases to search.

Take your young relatives fishing! Recruit your teenaged grandchildren, nieces, nephews and cousins to go Ancestor Fishing in the great internet ocean. Maybe one or more young relatives will get hooked on family research. Maybe they will reel in an ichthyosaur you’ve sought for decades.

What a great computer game for the summer. Recruit these young people to resurvey your ancestors. Email a family group sheet of the names you want resurveyed. Then send the young people the following instructions plus the actual checklist which will appear in this column next month. Of course, these instructions and this checklist work great for original internet surveys too.

The checklist was created with certain parameters in mind. No commercial genealogy sites are included. You probably can’t ask these young researchers to fork over fees for subscription sites. Of course, only sites constantly adding new data will meet the resurvey goals. The requests have to be small enough not to discourage young relatives. Yet the assignments must lead to success if at all possible. As all genealogists know, there is nothing like finding the new name or date or picture or story to turn a person on to family history. And the search must be limited in scope, so the check list will favor American research.

The instructions must be easy to follow. Most grandchildren are more computer literate than grandparents are. But they know little about genealogical internet research. Of course, all your grandchildren and nieces and nephews and cousins, like mine, are brilliant, so only a few instructions will be necessary. The instructions for young relatives follow.

The Ancestor Fishing Project objective is to add up-to-the-minute information to the family group sheets of ancestors. New information hits the internet every day, and some of it concerns your relatives! You don’t want to miss a single piece of data, so here’s how to go ancestor fishing on the internet.

You will need a computer with internet connection and a printer or disk to save data. If you don’t have an internet connection at home, you can use the computers at local libraries.

You need to know how to determine if the information you find on the internet refers to the person you are researching. This process is called ancestor identification. No matter how odd your ancestor’s name, someone else in the world will have it. So just because you find fourteen pieces of information on Absalom Pennington doesn’t mean all that information refers to your Absalom Pennington.

I recommend the rule of three: if you find three matches, you should save the information for further study. For example, if your Absalom Pennington was born about 1750 of Morganton, North Carolina, married Margery Perkins and died in Illinois, and you find an Absalom Pennington born about 1775, married Rebecca Courtney and died in St Helena Parish, Louisiana, it is clear you are dealing with two different men.

But if you find an entry for an Absalom Pennington who had a land grant in Morganton, North Carolina in 1795, you will want to pay attention for there are three matches: the name, the place and the date. This is important because you don’t want to collect volumes of material on people who could not possibly be relatives. However, do forward any information that “might” match to your family genealogist.

Spelling has only been standardized for a little more than one hundred years. Even then people often wrote names as they heard them. In addition, dialects were much more pronounced before the advent of radio and television, so names sounded different when spoken with a German accent from those spoken with an Irish brogue. So refuse to look at names by spelling only, consider also their sound. For example, I have found Pennington spelled as Peniton, Penitent, Peninton, etc., and Absalom spelled as Abraham, Abslom, Absolam, etc. This means that when doing internet surveys, all spellings must be used in each search.

Also use nicknames and middle names for the search. For example, if you were resurveying Absalom Pennington’s daughter, Mary, you would also do a search for her nickname which is Polly. Absalom Pennington’s grandson was named Absalom Pennington Free. You should look for him under Abs Free and Absalom (by all spellings) Free as well as the full name. He can also be found under A. P. Free.

You now have the basic information for the Ancestor Fishing computer game which will appear in the August 2006 issue. In the meantime, if you have emailed LaRae Free Kerr and not received a reply, please send the email again to this new address, itsallrelatives@sfcn.org.