Roundtable Recap – Untangling the
Lives of Individuals Who Share the Same Name
January 2, 2025
The topic for the January
Roundtable was how to determine which individual is your ancestor when multiple
people with the same name are found. The main take away from information shared
by GenFriends members who have experience with this dilemma is to DOCUMENT
EVERYTHING. Some people prefer a word document, but most like the greater
versatility that a spreadsheet has to offer. The key is to use what works best
for you to organize the found information in such a way that it can be sorted
and analyzed.
A basic format for such a
table could include a top row with each person’s name followed by a second row
with column labels repeated under each person in row 1. The columns would
include things like event, place, age, and comments. Additional columns such as
street address, occupation, or religion can be added if research indicates they
would be useful. It is helpful to include one column to the far left of
everything that is labeled Year. A simple example, based on the multiple Thomas
Bartons in my lineage, is shown below.
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Thomas Barton |
Thomas Barton |
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Year |
Event |
Place |
Age |
Comments |
Event |
Place |
Age |
Comments |
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You can see how easy it would be to add an additional Thomas Barton. Inserting other labeled columns would also be fairly simple. It’s advisable to keep the years in chronological order to more easily track relocation to another area and to help assess which records might be missing. Additional year rows could easily be inserted. Using a fill color helps to quickly distinguish between different individuals. It’s okay to not have all the information to complete a row. For example, a headstone would provide a birth year but not the birth place. The headstone information should still be recorded, but further research would be needed to support the birth year and provide a location. The headstone would also need to provide additional information, such as the unique wife’s name, to know which individual it should be applied to. If a record cannot be conclusively assigned to a specific individual, it should be saved, but not entered on the spreadsheet, until more information is found.
The information added to the
spreadsheet should be from actual documents, headstones, etc. Things like old
family stories, unsourced data in someone else’s tree, and biographical
sketches can provide leads to actual records, but they are not themselves concrete
documentation.
Several GenFriends members
recommend maintaining and adding to your same-name spreadsheet even after
determining which individual is your ancestor. The spreadsheet data can help when
assessing newly found records. There is also the possibility that you will discover in the future that the non-ancestor is part of a different branch of your tree,
and it will be nice to have their data already sorted out.
Some
other tips from GenFriends members:
Do not assume that the same-name
Sr. and Jr. that you find are father and son. They could be uncle and nephew,
cousins, or there might not be any biological link between them. It was fairly
common when there were two men with the same name living in the same community
for the older man to be called Sr. and the younger man referred to as Jr.
When looking at BLM records,
always check records before and after those of your person. People often
travelled in pairs or groups and their records would have been recorded at the
same time. There might be a relative or a member of your ancestor’s FAN club in
the records before and after his, and this could be useful in evaluating
exactly who the BLM record belongs to.
Share your findings to help other
researchers maintain accuracy. GenFriends members report they have notified managers
and/or added text to Find a Grave memorials. They have also added Alert Notes
to individuals on trees at Family Search. In Ancestry, GenFriends members have
sent messages to other users providing the correct documentation, and they have
also made sure their own tree is accurate and provides good sources. It can be
helpful to save a note in a text file on your computer. That way it can be
copied and shared as needed without having to retype everything. There was also
a reminder to share your findings directly with other family members who are
researching the tree.
References:
“Untangling
the Lives of Individuals Who Share the Same Name” by Hannah Kubacak, STIRPES,
June 2023, pages 38-42
“The
Family Tree Problem Solver” by Marsha Hoffman Rising
