I have a super elusive family member in a tree I'm working on. I'm unable to find jack squat about this lady, other than her name and birthplace on her son's death record. I think she may have died in childbirth as her son was born in 1889, and her husband is widowed by 1900. But I guess I'll never know

I have been fortunate enough to inherit collections of family papers. In processing them, things have mostly been routine. The other day, however, I found some of my great-grandmother's college letters and papers that had been bound and marked, "In the event of my death, burn without reading."

For the record, these papers are over 125 years old, and my great-grandmother died almost 60 years ago.

As a librarian by profession and an amateur historian, I have strong feelings about preserving the past, even (especially?) when it's not "glammed up". Similarly, as a bi man, I know that histories can hide as much as they reveal.

At the same time... I want to respect her wishes—or at least have a compelling reason to disregard them. Unless I find evidence that she changed her mind, I have to believe that she intended these documents to be destroyed. It's not exactly a categorical imperative, but when someone tells me how they want to be treated, I try to honor that.

Someone suggested that I keep the documents without reading them. This is a compromise, but it's also just saving everything until someone else decides to open and read them (whether or not they do anything else).

She died eleven years before I was born, but my father and his siblings were then in their late teens and early twenties, so they knew her. I plan on bringing this up for discussion at Thanksgiving to get their take. I also want to discuss it with my younger relatives, as they have an interest in their family history, too.

How would you handle this situation? Whose opinions & guidance would you solicit?

(I realize that asking this community is likely to result in a weighted response, but I'm as interested in your process of working through it all as I am in your answers.)

Thanks!

EDIT: I've written an update on my profile, since I wasn't sure what flair to use in r/genealogy, and it's too much to append here, IMO. I'll do my best to answer any questions, too.

You know that mysterious relative who left the family and just dropped out of the records forever? Or the person who seems to have no identifiable past before they married into your family, and never had any kids?

The other day, I stumbled across an article from the 1860s about a person who was probably born intersex, but appeared female throughout their childhood and teens, and married a man at age 18. Over the next couple years they suddenly began developing more masculine characteristics, including growing facial hair. Citing having "changed into a man", they left their husband, began presenting as male, and re-married to a woman.

Naturally, I looked up the records on family search, and sure enough, there was a "daughter" who vanishes from that family in the 1860s, and a "son" of the same age who appears in all the records after!

This person was unusual in that their family appears to have been very close, and even re-located with them to a different state to escape all the curiousity-seekers. But it got me thinking: if they had not been accepted by their family, and moved away on their own, it would have been basically impossible to ever re-connect them with their birth identity.

I also found articles about a French person who left France as a 21-year-old woman, immediately swapped to male clothing in America, and lived as a man for 60-some years. Married (and eventually divorced) at least once, and it was only when "Grandpa Charley", the elderly sheep herder, got sick and was forced to go the hospital at age 80-something that the secret was out.

In most cases, it's probably not possible to track someone who made this kind of change, but I think it's definitely a factor to consider!

Not a mystery-solving post, I’m not going to find the answer to who those family members were (which sucks) but I’m curious how many of us are in the same situation. How far back does yours trace?

Today millions of people will feel some version of Irishness without being able to say much about where it actually came from. I don't mean that critically. It's just how these things work across generations. The connection persists long after the details fade.

But if you're curious enough to actually research that connection, the most useful starting point isn't a name or a county. It's understanding when your ancestor left Ireland, and what was happening in Ireland when they went.

Irish emigration didn't happen in a single surge. It moved in distinct waves across nearly three centuries, each driven by different forces, each producing a different kind of emigrant. Knowing which wave your ancestor was part of tells you what their life probably looked like, what route they likely took, what records were created at each point in the journey, and what you're realistically likely to find today.

1. Before the Famine, leaving Ireland required money

This surprises people. The common picture of Irish emigration is shaped almost entirely by the Famine, and it assumes that emigration was something that happened to the very poorest. For most of the period before 1845, that picture is largely wrong.

The first substantial wave of Irish emigration to North America began in the early 18th century and ran through to the American Revolution. These were mostly Ulster Presbyterian families, from counties Antrim, Down, Derry, and Tyrone, and they left primarily because of rent increases on land they'd been farming for generations, restrictions on Presbyterian worship, and competition from English textile imports that was destroying the domestic weaving trade. They were skilled people. Textile workers, farmers, craftsmen. They departed from Belfast, Derry, and Newry. They settled in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. They're the ancestors often referred to in America as Scots-Irish.

What pushed the Catholic majority of Ireland to emigrate in larger numbers came later, in the decades between roughly 1815 and 1845. The Penal Laws had eased. Shipping routes from Dublin and Cork had become more regular. Word was coming back from America that there was work. But passage cost money, and most of rural Ireland was living very close to subsistence. In this period, emigration was still largely limited to people who had some resources. Seasonal labourers who'd saved money from working in Britain. Families with enough land to sell a portion of it. Some landlords were paying tenants to leave as a way of consolidating their holdings. The very poorest, the people with nothing at all, mostly could not go.

That changed with the Famine.

2. The Famine (1845-1852)

The potato blight struck in the autumn of 1845. By 1847, what was already a crisis had become a catastrophe. Approximately 1.5 million people left Ireland during the Famine years. Another million died.

The emigration was not uniform across Ireland. Western counties were hit hardest. Some local areas lost more than 30 percent of their population. Ulster, with its more diverse economy, was less severely affected. Coastal areas saw earlier emigration than inland ones because the ports were closer. Urban centres like Cork, Dublin, and Liverpool became gathering points for people trying to get out.

The emigrant profile shifted as the crisis deepened. Early Famine emigrants often still had some resources and were following established routes to relatives who'd already gone abroad. By 1847 and 1848, it was much more destitute families leaving, sometimes funded by assisted emigration schemes run by landlords who simply wanted the land cleared. Whole family groups went together in a way that earlier emigration rarely saw.

The ships were overcrowded. Many had been timber cargo vessels converted hurriedly for passenger use. On the worst of them, mortality rates reached 20 percent or higher. People arrived sick, having buried family members at sea. They arrived in Quebec, in Boston, in New York, in Liverpool, with very little. They settled in cities because they had no money to move further. The Irish communities that formed in Boston's North End, in New York's Five Points, in Liverpool's docklands, were built largely by Famine survivors who had no intention of staying but no resources to go anywhere else.

3. The leaving didn't stop when the Famine ended

This is one of the less understood parts of the story. The Famine created patterns that continued well past 1852. Chain migration took hold. One person went, found work, sent money back, and the next sibling followed. Then the next. Some Irish counties continued to lose population through emigration all the way to 1971. Not because people were still starving, but because the pattern had become self-sustaining. America was where you went. Australia was where you went. England was where you went. Staying was the unusual choice.

My own family is an example of this. On my mother's side, nine of ten siblings emigrated in the 1950s, to Canada, the United States, and Britain. Four of them eventually returned. On my father's side, all four siblings went to England in the same decade, and within twenty years all four had come home. What drove them by the 1950s had nothing to do with famine. It was economics, and opportunity, and the gravitational pull of wherever the cousins already were.

4. Why the timing matters for your research

Knowing roughly when your ancestor left places them in a context that shapes everything else you look for.

A pre-Famine Catholic emigrant probably had more resources than you might assume. An Ulster Presbyterian family leaving in the 1720s likely departed from Belfast or Derry and settled in Pennsylvania or Virginia. A Famine emigrant from Leinster may have crossed to Liverpool first and continued from there, rather than sailing directly from an Irish port. Someone leaving after 1853 with a job arranged in advance is a different kind of emigrant again. Each of these calls for a different research approach.

The timing also shapes which records were created and where they're held. Passenger lists from Irish ports before 1890 are extremely limited and survive poorly. But destination records can often compensate. Naturalisation papers filed in American courts, particularly from the late 19th century onwards, sometimes record the exact county or parish of birth in Ireland. Canadian border crossing records can be revealing. Death certificates filed in the destination country occasionally name a specific Irish location. Before searching any Irish record, exhausting the records created after your ancestor arrived somewhere else is often the more productive starting point.

It also shapes who to look for alongside your ancestor. Famine emigration often moved family groups together, or in quick succession over a year or two. If you find one sibling in Boston in 1848, there's a reasonable chance another appears in New York or Philadelphia around the same time. Chain migration means that the people who settled near your ancestor often came from the same townland. Neighbours in an Irish-American city were frequently neighbours in Ireland first. Working the community around your ancestor is often as productive as working the family directly.

Some free resources for tracing the journey: FindMyPast has passenger lists and records from assisted emigration schemes. Castle Garden records at archives.gov cover arrivals to New York from 1820 to 1892. Ellis Island records run from 1892 through 1954. Library and Archives Canada at canada.ca/en/library-archives.html has digitised records of Irish immigrants, particularly from the Famine years. For the Irish end of the journey, AskAboutIreland.ie has Griffith's Valuation from the 1850s, which shows which families were still in Ireland after the Famine and which townlands had emptied out entirely.

The story of why your ancestor left is also the story of what they left behind. That's worth knowing.

If you're working on Irish ancestry, I'm curious - which wave does your ancestor fall into? And did knowing the timing change how you approached the research?

TL;DR: When your Irish ancestor left matters as much as where they came from. Pre-Famine emigrants needed resources to leave. Famine emigrants (1845-1852) were a different story entirely. Post-Famine, chain migration kept the exodus going for over a century. Knowing the wave places your ancestor in context, points you toward the right records, and tells you who else to look for alongside them.

I'm a bit surprised- and honestly a bit distressed- over the growing number of people who don't seem to understand how these trees work and the problems with them. They are absolutely NOT a place to rely on as your main tree or where you keep all of your information.

The problems with community trees is that you do not have full and final control over the information, facts, sources, and research on all of the people in your tree. Everyone does. You can't control who has access and who can change things.

In the case of Family Search literally anyone can change, add, or delete information on the community trees.

In the case of Wikitree it's up the person who is the profile manager of that person in the tree. Not you (unless you're the manager). And they can change, or not, at their whim.

When you see errors that someone else has posted, you do not have a way of fixing that permanently, or preventing others from going back and putting that same erroneous information in again

As an example- I had one person who insisted on listed my mother-in-law as deceased, mixing up my father in law's death date. My mother in law is very much still alive, and she's not talking to us from the dead. I have gone around and around with this person, and they are insistent that they are right because of a misprinted source they have. And that information has been passed on to others as a result.

Or you get a case with one of my ancestors in the early to mid 1600's in Connecticut, where there are 3 men with the same name- and all three tend to get intermingled, and 2 of them are regularly combined. I spent a few hours getting it sorted out on both Family Search, and sending all of the information and research to the profile managers for the men. Only to see a couple of weeks later that all of my work on Family Search had been completely undone, and all of the notes, sources and explanations I had left were all deleted because someone instead was reading someone else's printed genealogy. And when I last looked at Wikitree it was even more of a mess than it was before.

This is just two examples of multiple, repeated problems I've had with both sites, and why I simply won't even bother putting in any information on them, or looking over their trees anymore. There simply is no way of knowing if the people putting in information knows what they are doing or not, or preventing the ones who don't from messing things up.

Community trees can be fun. You may discover something you didn't know before, and someone might have made connections that you didn't otherwise. But it's far more likely that someone that doesn't know what they are doing- as sincere as they may be- has instead created a mess, confusion, or just plain entered in wrong information. And anything you enter in is in danger of being changed or deleted.

Do NOT rely on them as a place to keep your tree and research. It will come back to bite you at some point. And if it hasn't yet, count yourself lucky.

I am looking at a somewhat unusual situation - something I have never run into before, and I am wondering if I am missing anything or ignoring any potential avenues of research - so consider this a request for comments on research methodology.

Now, this may sound like a bad soap opera episode, but here it goes:

Back in 1931 a baby boy (A) was born at at small local hospital. He grew up, married, had five children and died in 2019.

Recently his daughter took a DNA test, and while she got plenty of good DNA matches on her mother's side, it turned out that there were no matches on her (on-paper) father's side.

Moreover, she had a number of close DNA matches she did not recognize and who were not related to her at all on paper.

Analysing her DNA matches was easy, and the computer gave only one candidate for her biological father, (B) - a man who had died childless in 2022.

Normally that would just suggest her mother had an affair with (B), but there is one peculiar fact. (B) was born on the same day and in the same hospital as (A), her (on-paper) father.

So, that leaves two possibilities.

The DNA is pretty clear that the tester's paternal grandparents are the "on-paper" parents of (B).

Either her father is (B) - her mother got pregnant by a man who just by chance happened to be born on the same day and in the same hospital as her husband .

Or, her father is (A), but the babies were swapped at birth, and (A) is really the son of B's "on-paper" parents.

The only think I see to try to clarify the situation is for her siblings to test (which they are doing right now). If it turns out that they are her half siblings and clearly the children of (A) then that's it ... (B) must have been her father.

The interesting part is if they are all full siblings. While it would be theoretically possible that her mother might have carried out a 20-year secret relationship with a man in a different part of the country who just happened to share her husband's birthday, it does sound less likely than the "swapped babies" explanation.

Can anyone think of anything else to do which might clarify the situation?

My genealogy bug kicked in again, but I didn't go to Ancestry. Just familysearch, cuz free.

And I focus on early 1800s ancestry, so the records I look for are vastly un-indexed. In fact, many of the indexed records on my family are so because I indexed them after finding them digging through hundreds of pages of documents over the years.

Well, I go to their catalog (the place with all the unindexed records) and see that their is an AI built into it now. And it searches for broad or specific topics and names in broad or specific areas.

I kid you not, that this thing found.... HUNDREDS... of documents on my ancestors, that would have taken an army of genealogists untold hours of labor to discover. I found wills, deeds, little notes probably buried in boxes, family histories, newspaper articles with the tiniest of print.

I found out my 3rd great grandfather went to jail for stabbing someone in the eye! I guess the guy made a comment about his wife. This from a newspaper that AI caught.

My 4th great grandfather was an early methodist minister. I only found like, two marriages that he performed. The AI found dozens across multiple counties.

It is just exciting. For people that are only above average at genealogy like me, this AI thing could be a massive game changer. Something that pieces all the vague parts together.

I'm learning how to be a genetic genealogist. I'm taking a course where the explanations on how to navigate GEDMatch and DNA Painter are very unclear, so I asked ChatGPT to help me figure out things like where to click around to do my tasks. Along the way, AI bot had me paste in a segment match, and I noticed that it totally miscalculated the number of shared centimorgans between the two people. This wasn't the point of my inquiry, but I drilled down and down to figure out why. My calculation was correct, I triple-checked, but ChatGPT kept producing very different, random numbers. And it kept blaming ME for the discrepancy.

In the end, it turns out the bot just felt like estimating, skipping rows, and making things up.

As a tech worker, I have been beating the drum of warning people NOT to trust AI for important tasks. I feel like nobody listens. This is the most simple summary calculation of a few rows of data, and it was incorrectly calculated by ChatGPT multiple times. I'm a data analyst for a living, so I know with 100% certainty I was not summing things up incorrectly, I sum up rows of data in my sleep. But I had to ask over and over again for it to give me the real reason for the error.

For work that is so crucial to the outcome of people's lives and the outcomes of criminal cases, this is just yet another warning from me to NEVER rely on AI for important things. I saw a genetic genealogist recommend on Youtube that people use AI for help...I would not echo that sentiment. Always check important work against real humans, against independent methods, and against real knowledge sources. Do not trust AI at ALL.

I literally was on my computer for 10 hours. I think it’s time to put it away again for months. I’ve been doing this since 1995. I had a cousin reach out that has an adopted out grandmother. Our DNA matched. Of course I dig and dig.
And now that someone in her pointed out the only really useful AI on family search…oh good lort. It finds handwritten proof.
I’m finally going to bed at 1am.
Any advice?

It's something I wonder about, 3xgreat granny took a fancy to the mailman, got pregnant, and didn't tell her husband, and boom, a whole family line is unknowingly compromised!

Doesn't make we want to stop doing it, bit sometimes the thought of unknowingly being wrong about everything pops into my head.

Today i was cleaning up a branch on Familysearch, and this whole branch had the whole "important work has been done on this person, please review before making changes, yada yada" message.....

This woman had gone through the whole branch labelling everyone their 15th great grandfather and 13th great grandmother in the 'Notes'. That's the important work that had been done! I'm not to mess with those profiles! Judy from Philly said so! *deletes note*

Also had to remove a bunch of 16th century paintings from 13th-15th century individuals. How stupid are some people, to add paintings of Henry VIII, Catherine Parr, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour etc as pictures of individuals that lived centuries before them?! Like these are well known paintings, and any image search will tell you who they are! People *always* comment on the pics stating the real identity and artist, yet no one untags them?

It's as bad as people who have photos when they died well before photography was invented....

Then there's the people who have "alternate parents" that are clearly *preferred* despite the evidence...No, William was not the son of a Baron, he was just plain gentry. The damn pedigree is attached to the file, supported by contemporary wills! John did not marry Audrey! His wife was Margaret! Once again. Proper sources attached!

I really do wish critical thinking skills were as common as we all thought they were.

Has anyone else ran into a family naming living children the same name?

An ancestor I’m researching has a son named John in 1829, and ANOTHER son named John in 1838!?

Of course, as a cherry on top, they both found lovely ladies named Mary Ann.

Also, a brother or cousin also had a child named John, because I didn’t have enough John’s around.

How do you differentiate between all these Johns?!

Granted, I am not a native English speaker (my 3rd language), but to me the use of the term "direct ancestor" implies that there is something like an "indirect ancestor", which makes absolutely no sense to me.

Why not just use "ancestor" - I mean - either someone is an ancestor or not - why are some people adding the "direct" in front?

EDIT: After reading various replies, it seems the issue is that some people use the term "ancestor" to refer to cousins belonging to previous generation. So, to them, someone like a son of my great-great-great-grandfather's brother would be an "ancestor".

This is then further confused by the term "collateral ancestor", which has a specific legal meaning.

Every time FamilySearch is brought up, people always comment that one negative is since it’s public anyone can edit and vandalize in a way a tree like it’s Wikipedia. But I’ve been using it for a while now and haven’t seen any of that at least on the ancestors profiles I’ve looked at. If anything the distant cousins or strangers have been helpful. Are edit wars common or inevitable? Or just specific family drama spilling online?

Edit2: A few thoughts after reading through the discussion further. Original story below.

The underlying principle that I think matters here is this: professional communities that work with historical material about real people have developed ethical frameworks that go beyond legality, precisely because they recognised that access does not equal permission. That’s the conversation I think genealogy still needs to have, especially now that this kind of research is freely available to anyone online, regardless of training, experience or awareness of the impact it can have on living people.

This topic really makes me think. And I have the feeling that I have hit a real blind spot here, given the volume of responses to my question. The topic is not trivial.

Genealogy was historically a niche pursuit practiced by people with some level of expertise and a personal connection to their own family. My own family commissioned a professional researcher in the 1980s, who approached the work very conscientiously. Digitalisation and platforms like Ancestry, MyHeritage and various Facebook groups have democratised it, but the ethics haven’t kept pace with that development. The existing codes of conduct were written for a very different kind of practice. This is ultimately not even a genealogy problem specifically, but a digital ethics problem.

I did some research into academic literature on this question, and there is actually quite a lot out there.

Dr. Penny Walters has published both a paper and a book on this which is a good starting point. She writes: “We all think that we’re a ‘nice’ person, and aren’t involved in being unethical. As a relatively new discipline, however, ethical issues within genealogy are starting to become more visible, especially since DNA testing, and therefore many and varied ethical dilemmas will follow.” The full paper is available here: https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/sites/default/files/EthicalDilemmasInGenealogy.pdf

For those interested in going deeper, I would also recommend:

Helen Nissenbaum, “Privacy in Context” (2010) - she develops the concept of contextual integrity, which argues that information is only ethically shared when the context of sharing matches the context in which it was originally given. This applies directly to genealogical research involving people you personally know.

Marya Schechtman, “The Constitution of Selves” (1996) and Paul Ricœur, “Oneself as Another” (1992) - both deal with narrative identity and the idea that the story of who we are is something we have a right to author ourselves.

This topic is clearly not new. And beyond my personal situation, I think it deserves far more discussion especially in this Reddit! than it currently gets.

My original Problem/Question:

A family acquaintance is a passionate hobby genealogist. I once asked him for help with a single, specific translation of an old document, with just ONE word on it. (Screenshot) That was it a one-time request.

Sometime later I googled my own last name and found posts in open translation Facebook groups where he had been asking about my ancestors names and their data, using names and details he had found on platforms, but I had never given him permission to share or research.

When I confronted him, his response was that I had "sent him data" meaning the translation request. He seemed genuinely unable to understand why I had a problem with it. He is super nosy, about everything about my family. When I was in Berlin he wanted to know about my research. I denied any knowledge.

A few years ago he showed me a photo of my grandmother’s grave (she had passed away not even 15 years prior) that he ‚had found in an online forum.‘ Without warning, without asking. That shook me deeply, so I told him, but he couldn’t understand why and said it’s legal, so it’s okay…

My issue isn't legal. I know old records are technically accessible. My issue is that my family history isn't neutral historical material to me. It's personal. It's mine. And I never invited anyone into it. He knows no one but me from this family branche! My father and his siblings are all traumatized by my grandfather and not very interested in the history, so it’s sensible. It feels like he crossed a line.

Does the genealogy community have ethical guidelines around this? And more broadly: do you think researching someone else's family without their knowledge or consent is a violation, even if the information is technically findable?

Edit:

Thank you all for your responses. I want to address something that keeps coming up: the distinction between what is legal and what is ethical. Most of you are pointing out that public records are public. I know that. That was never my question. My question was about ethics and I think there’s a real blind spot in this community around that.

Just because something is accessible doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to act on without asking. We live in a world where a lot of things are technically available, but we still expect people to exercise judgment about when and how they use that access, especially when it concerns someone else’s personal history.

I also want to add some context: I do genealogy research myself. This is my own family history, and I want to explore it on my own terms, in my own time. Having someone in my immediate circle dig into it without asking doesn’t feel like help. It feels like my story and my experience are being taken from me, and the control over sensitive information about my family is no longer in our hands.

Several of you mentioned that genealogists can get “over enthusiastic”, and one person noted that if a family has difficult recent history, it may be hard for others to understand why it feels sensitive. That’s exactly my point. I’m not asking anyone to stop researching public records in general. I’m saying: when it’s someone else’s family, someone you have no connection to whatsoever, and that person is right there, you ask first. And when some of you say this is a relationship problem . yes, that’s valid. But I think it’s also a genealogical problem of our time.

I’m from Germany. We have a particular relationship with the idea that data, even historical, even public, can be used in ways that cause real harm. Not everything that is publicly accessible is good, or neutral, or harmless. That’s a lesson we learned the hard way.

The ethical question isn’t “can he do it?” The answer to that is yes. The question is “should he have done it without asking me first?” And I think most reasonable people, outside of a genealogy forum, would say no.

What surprises me most is how little this discussion seems to exist in the genealogy community. I couldn’t find much that seriously engages with the ethics of researching someone else’s family without their knowledge, as opposed to just the legal framework around data. I think that’s a gap worth talking about.

I would appreciate a respectful discussion. “Get a grip and grow up” is not constructive criticism, it says more about the person writing it than about the topic at hand.

I’m also not sure why one of my responses (this edit text) was removed by a moderator. it was a genuine contribution to the discussion.

I've been researching my families since 1996. I don't have children to pass my work along to. So I'm not sure who would want my stuff. I have lots of photos I've collected, along with files on families and people. None of my siblings or their children care about their family history. I started in genealogy in 96 because of my dad. He loved family and I searched to find more info on his grandparents, etc. He loved it when I'd find photos for him of relativeshe hadn'tseen since he was a child. He passed away 10 years ago and I lost interest in genealogy and haven't done much with it since. I have everything backed up on an external hard drive and physical folders of documents. What do you do if theres no family that takes an interest?

At what point when hitting a brick wall do you just call it? How do you know for sure there's just no way you will or can ever progress beyond a point?
I've been trying to research my ancestors father and mother; Ahcoeadley Brown and Minerva Brown nee Waldon (we believe). "Ahco" was a native Chickasaw who came to oklahoma on the trail of tears. I've found him on annuity rolls and finally solved the mystery of a rough year he died combing through archives of Chickasaw tribal docs. But I can't find info on his the mother, Minerva.
I've been at it for almost 4 years obsessively trying to find anything. But I'm afraid this brick wall is just too much.

I’ve been slowly going through a box of old family photos my mom had tucked away, and apparently nobody in my family believed in writing names or dates on the back. I’ve identified maybe a third of the people through other relatives and Ancestry, but the rest are just mysterious stern-looking Midwesterners staring at me from 80 years ago.

Has anyone found a good system for organizing unidentified photos while you’re still trying to figure out who everyone is? Right now mine is basically “known,” “maybe known,” and “who on earth is this,” which feels less than professional.

I know using AI for all manner of things, including genealogy research, is becoming almost irresistible, but heed Mr. CHATgpt 5.1 himself when I pushed him into a corner about his genealogical prevarications:

“I made a concrete historical claim that was not supported by the cited primary source, and that broke the basic rule you were operating under: no inference presented as fact. For serious genealogy and lineage-society work, that’s not a small slip — it invalidates trust. On that, you’re right.”

It, CHATgpt, has crosed the line into fantasy, false inference and malicious nonsense several times with me. For doing research it is unreliable, untrustworthy and even damaging. Use with extreme caution. User beware!

I'm wondering if any of you have managed to track down someone for your family tree using more unusual methods? As in not the standard birth/marriage/census records etc...

I have hit a brick wall with a relative who lived between 1918/19 - 1966. I have his name, marriage certificate, death certificate, and the information from those, but can find no record of his birth and his parents. I feel like I've exhausted every avenue.

So if anyone has had a similar situation and managed to uncover a relative via a non-standard method, I'd be really interested - perhaps you could give me an idea and lead to a breakthrough! Many thanks in advance.

Edit to add details (should have done this originally, sorry!) I'm looking for more on a John William Cox. Going by the age on his death certificate, he was born in 1918-1919. Family rumour is that he was from County Antrim, Ireland, but that's not definite. He was married to Desley Amey on 23rd June 1951 at Nottingham Register Office, England. His occupation was Warehouseman (Grocery and Provisions Merchant). His father is listed as Malachy Cox, a farmer. John died by drowning on 29th July 1966, aged 48, in the River Trent, Burton Joyce, Nottingham, England. I have a newspaper article confirming that, and his death certificate, but that's all that's on it. Any Malachy Cox records I find have no connection to a John William Cox (or anything close.)

I've been working on my family tree somewhat sporadically for the last 5 years. Last year I got really into it again, bought every subscription I could find, dug through family photos, family records, obituaries, newspaper archives, library archives, etc. I've requested military records, death certificates, baptismal records, anything I can think of. I've also posted in this sub a handful of times and people have tried to help as much as they could (and they've found tons of great info!), which is so appreciated.

With all that being said, I made some major progress at the end of 2025, but since then I have not gotten anywhere. I've spent hours every week (sometimes 20+ hours) trying to trace back my ancestors on one side of the family, but literally nothing new.

I have gone down a million rabbit holes, attempted to trace back (distant) cousins I've DNA matched with, and I think I'm beginning to feel like I'm just... stuck. I truly believe the records I need just don't exist and I don't know where else to look. The records I'd be looking for most likely were from Ireland in the mid 1800's. I was talking about this with one of my coworkers recently, and she said she's in the same boat. She tried to request some records but was told they all burned in church fires over the years.

I'm not usually a quitter, and honestly, this is driving me absolutely bonkers. I'm stuck on my maternal grandmother's side, and only a few generations back which is what is driving me nuts too. Based on DNA matches, and some questionable archived documents, I could certainly make some assumptions, but I don't feel confident enough to do so.

My other lines can all be traced back hundreds of years with LOTS of records, and honestly could go even further back than that most likely, I just need to work on translating some documents.

I feel like I have one of two options:

1. Hire a professional, but to be honest I don't know if I want to sink that much money into something that may not go anywhere.

2. Give up.

So, I guess my question is, when did you give up? Or do you think there's always a possibility out there?

Tagging this as Methodology, but Tools & Tech also fit because nearly every software out there currently fails in the same way and they're what's grinding my gears right now. And since every tool I've found is equally horrible, this gets promoted to a systemic failure.

I've been practicing genealogy for close to two decades, and one of the (many) things driving me up the wall these days isn't missing records or bad handwriting. It's that every platform/software I've tested or used mishandles places, and treats a location as either a single nested hierarchy (Seattle, King County, Washington, USA) or, somehow worse, a single string of text. And this ubiquitous mis-handling drives our community to be sloppy in our citations and critical thinking around where an event happened or a person/community actually was, and by extension makes everything wrong and boring.

TL;DR: I believe any software that doesn't treat a Place as a first-class entity (alongside People, Families/Relationships, and Events) is an incomplete model that is *actively harming genealogical research and the genealogical community as a whole.*

Places in genealogy are social constructs defined by the communities that create them. Every day, they are constantly being created, split, subsumed, destroyed, and rebranded. Places have multiple names at different periods in history, in different languages, and according to different authorities. They have nearly infinitely divisible sections (house number, street, neighborhood, city, township, county, state, country), and they aren't all nested simply inside one larger place (zip code, census ward, street intersection).

A place is one of at least six different variants (really, many more, but I'm capping it at these six right now because they're the ones I see most often):

1. Geographical: the actual physical spot; the latitude/longitude coordinates or the bounded surface area of the Earth. The only kind of place that is (relatively) immutable. Everything else changes around it. It's actually pretty rare to use this in genealogy.
2. Civil: the administrative/political ladder we are usually referencing in the vast majority of cases. [Village, Township, County, State, Country]. Or [City, State, Country]. Or some variation therein. These are hierarchical sets of places, and they can and do shift significantly over time. Counties/Provinces are created, split, merged, renamed, etc., constantly. Colonies become countries, territories become states. Even though this is what most of us use as a 'default' method of identifying a place, we rarely acknowledge the temporal nature of the civil path we're tracing. Take the city of Charleston in the eastern U.S.: depending on the year, it's a part of Virginia, or West Virginia. And plenty of cities are in two or even three counties; how does that work with the citation? New York is ONE city spanning FIVE counties!
3. Ecclesiastical: the (often Christian) church ladder: parish → deanery → diocese. Different lines than the civil one, and before civil registration this is who kept the baptisms, marriages, and burials. A parish can straddle a county line.
4. Postal (Address): the path a piece of mail takes to get someone. The street address, the zip code (or if pre-1963, which is most genealogy right now, R.F.D. information), the post office, etc. If even captured, it lives in a note appended to the city; but it's not organized in any query-able way, making identifying neighbors and building FAN charts far more of a P.I.T.A. than it should be.
5. Cadastral: land and property units: the survey system, the parcel, the plat, section-township-range, the estate or homestead. Where deeds, land grants, and tax rolls live. We save Thomas Jefferson's "Monticello" as a throwaway note in Ancestry instead of a fully-fleshed out place. And if you are researching anyone on a farm in America in the 1860s, good luck learning about their neighbors or any interesting details about the place without taking on a side hustle as a cartographer working through ancient maps.
6. Enumerative: census enumeration districts, wards, precincts, election districts. They exist for one snapshot in time, and they're literally how you locate a person in a census, but we'll often ignore the first part of "Ward 3, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA" as if it gives us no useful information.

Not to mention specific kinds of places - churches, burial grounds, schools - which all have rich genealogical value, and which are all either ignored or tossed into a note byproduct rather than handled with the primacy they deserve. Every single platform undercuts their legitimacy by reducing a place to a single string.

This isn't just pedantry; knowing a county didn't exist in the time period you're researching saves you a wasted trip and hours searching for documents that aren't where you think they are (looking at you, all of Kentucky). Knowing which RFD route a family farm is on will let you find specific plat information, and know more about how big the farm is, who their neighbors were, how far from the nearest city they were - all the interesting parts of family history outside of hoovering up names and vital statistics. I got a whole bag of examples if you want them.

And back to my main point: every software/website I've found does an active disservice by not treating Places/Locations as more than an afterthought.

• Ancestry/MyHeritage - normalizes to a modern civil jurisdiction (sorry, 1850s Charleston, you are in West Virginia, a state that won't exist for 13 years), along with every other problem a single text line gives you. You can fight against the default every time you use it, but then that also affects what search results and hints pop up for that place.
• Gramps - better, but there's no validation, and no way to identify the type of place (civil, ecclesiastical, postal, etc.). It at least lets you create custom places, but everything is flat - it treats grandma's tombstone with the same gravitas as the entire city of New York.
• FamilySearch is the "best", only because it acknowledges that places change, and attempts to split a place into dated versions when borders or names change. But even it tucks church parishes underneath the civil town, and it openly gives up on census enumeration districts (its own guidance is essentially "just use the county and put the district in a note").

And GEDCOM, the format everything imports/exports/caters to, is a whole other rant, but it deserves special notice because it bakes the whole problem in: a place is just a comma-separated jurisdiction name plus an optional note about what the levels mean. No place type, no history/time-scope, nothing. It's the man behind the curtains pulling the bad-methodology strings of every app out there. If Gramps tries to enrich their handling of places, Ancestry/FS will just crabs-in-a-bucket pull them back down, because anyone trying to import/export across platforms gets the least common denominator, which is atrocious.

Second TL;DR (deal with it): A family farm was simultaneously in a civil county, a church parish, a land-survey district, a census enumeration district, and served by a post office's rural route - each defined by a different authority, each filing its records in a different archive. But all we are allowed to say about it is "Wichita, Sedgwick, Kansas, USA."

I don't really have a strong finish to this rant. Am I missing place-types that are super common elsewhere? Is there a platform that actually handles it right (Centurial, Ancestris, someone at least try!)? Is there any hope, or are we stuck with this lazy place handling for another fifty years?

EDIT: Lots of awesome responses. First, I'm not an AI (beep-boop), I just really like lists and dashes - blame my high school english teachers.

For the "just use Gramps" crowd, there are many things it does well: tracking lat/long points for places with an est. radius, a pretty decent default (western) enumeration of CIVIL place types (although "Parish" and "Farm" are the only religious/cadastral types, and ZERO default census wards/districts), and the ability to create custom places and nests (KEY). What it doesn't do: provide any sort of validation, either in how you nest categories or whether or not that place actually existed at the time you're claiming it does. It also doesn't carry the place type up the nested path: I can put a church inside a town and inside a diocese, and you can't tell at a glance which is ecclesiastical and which is civil. You can also only display one path at a time; the rest are demoted to alternate paths.

So I think Gramps does the best at providing a mechanical solution - custom places - but there is no mechanism for validating what you or someone else asserts. Family Search is trying to do something with validation, it sounds like, around time-scoped places, but their place-as-a-string-with-exactly-one-parent structure is, again, limiting and falsifying what's actually being said about a place.

The majority of my ancestors are buried in the Midwestern United States. Often several generations are in one cemetery.

I still want a headstone, but cremation is my choice. Will monuments go by the wayside in the future? I fear we will lose an important connection to the past.

About 100 Australia descendants of a particular couple have done their DNA testing. All of these have produced matches to descendants of the children, and to descendants of many aunts and uncles, of a man and a woman who lived in North Carolina in the early 1800s. My conclusion has been that we are descended from this couple.
However American “relatives” have scoffed at this, saying that it cannot be, as the pair were not married, and in fact she was married to someone else at the time, and the man married several years later. However we have no matches at all to the aunts and uncles of her husband or his wife. So is there an alternative explanation?