Thursday, October 31, 2013

Top Ten Scary Halloween Stories for Genealogists


#10  You can’t join DAR because that ancestor Major Daniel Bollman was really a Hessian soldier.

#9    The family cemetery you've been looking for this past decade was just investigated by “Ghost Hunters” on TV.

#8   That Mayflower lineage document from 2nd Cousin Horace is really just a 1972 receipt from the moving company.

#7   Great Aunt Hilda, who you have avoided interviewing, just passed away and you never got the story of her passage through Ellis Island.

#6   That illustrious ancestor who, according to a 1912 compiled genealogy book, “occupied a chair of applied electronics at an important government institution” was really a convict sent to the electric chair.

#5  You finally get accepted to appear on “Genealogy Roadshow” and Josh Taylor kindly refutes your great grandparent’s lineage, leaving you back at square one on that branch of the family.

#4  You finally find that your 3rd great grandfather, David Burham who married Dorothy Burnham, had a mother named Judith Burnham and her mother was Martha Burnham. 

#3  A sudden natural disaster destroys your computer, floods your paper files, and burns your family photo albums.

#2  Your mother confesses about the “milkman”,  making 50% of your family tree moot.

#1  Your Irish grandfather’s y-DNA test comes back as Haplogroup H

Remedy:

Some of the situations above are avoidable.  Have a disaster plan for your files, interview those elderly relatives NOW, and double check your research. 

Go with the flow.  Sometimes you have to lop off a branch of your family tree and rebuild all over again.

Happy Halloween!


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Copyright 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

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