By LaRae Free Kerr

American citizens move all over the country as well as to other countries. My family certainly moves around – from state to state – and to isles of the sea. My ancestors all moved around too. So imagine my surprise, even shock, when I discovered from a U.S. 2005 census Bureau American Community Survey, that most Americans reside in the state where they were born (AARP Bulletin Sep 2007 p 29).

It was, to say the least, a proverbial paradigm shift for me. Here I’ve worked on finding ancestors for forty-five years, and I truly believed everybody moved and then moved again. But only those currently living in Nevada came from other places more than 75% of the time.

This demographic information is crucial to genealogical research, particularly in the 20th century. Those states retaining 73.2% to 82.3% of the persons born in them are the Great Lakes states plus Iowa, Kentucky, West Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. In all other states, 50 to 73% of their citizens were born in that state.

This means most Americans, most of the time, can find their twentieth-century relatives in the state in which those relatives were born. Does this change the way genealogists do their research? It certainly should: Genealogists should search all local records first unless, like me, they know for certain their ancestors came from distant parts.

This quick little graph from the AARP Bulletin reinforces — and modifies for some of us — why we do research the way we do. An individual story about Helen Gabrielle Fischl teaches much about why we do research in certain ways as well.

Helen Gabrielle Fischl sat comfortably in her wheelchair to tell me about her life. As I listened, I thought, this dear lady would be nearly impossible to find genealogically, so I asked if I could use her story as an example of how to do research. She agreed.

Helen Gabrielle Fischl was born 28 November 1916. We laughed because my first name is Helen, and I was born 28 November as well. Helen said in about the seventh grade, her name was written Helen G. Fischl on the school rolls. When her friends asked what the G stood for, she said, “Grace.”

At about age thirteen, Helen saw her name spelled Helyn in the newspaper, so she started to spell her name that way. By this time, Helen Gabrielle had become Helyn Grace.

During World War II, Helen worked in a parachute factory that had been a dress factory.
But she had to have a birth certificate to prove her citizenship to work there. She was able to acquire her baptism certificate from a Catholic Church in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Since she was three months old when baptized, she had two different dates.

Her mother created an affidavit for her when she was about twenty-four years old with her original name on it but also acknowledging that she was called Helyn Grace.

Earlier she married Roy H Steinberg and had two children. She was only sixteen at the time, so she lied about her age. When the divorce came, the son went with the father, the daughter with Helen.

Later Helen married Walter Murk, originally from Norway. But here in the United States, Walter spelled his surname Mork. Walter’s father created a document stating the name was originally Murk but was now Mork.

Is it no wonder then, that we sometimes have difficulty finding relatives? As near as I can tell, Helen Gabrielle Fischl did not have a single official document with both her correct name and correct date of birth.

What can we learn from her about how to research more efficiently? Several things. Read names phonetically. Ignore vowels. Search indexes by consonants only. For example, Helen should be searched Halen, Helyn as she spelled it, Hilin, Elena, etc. A search for the surname Murk in an index should include Mark, Mirk, Mork, maybe even Myrk, etc.

We can learn from Helen to fudge dates. People often lied about their ages to get married as Helen did, but also to enlist in the military – either to get in or to stay out, to get jobs with age requirements, to get drivers’ licenses, etc. Even if I have a specific date, I research with a bubble of about two years to either side. And if a record should be in the place I am searching but can’t be found in that five-year period, I add on another few years.

We learn that locating both of Helen’s children in public records might be difficult since one went with the father who presumably married again, and the other was incorporated into the Mork family. What surname did the daughter use?

Understanding demographics such as that from the Census Bureau as well as individual experiences such as Helen’s, dictate genealogists’ sleuthing activities.

LaRae Free Kerr, M ED, can be reached at Itsallrelatives@sfcn.org or at Itsallrelatives.us, our ever improving website. Be sure to check the blog.