“You can find everything online,” goes the all-too-common assumption. Some people seem to think that if they don’t remember exactly where/when/to whom their great-great-grandmother was born, surely they’ll be able to find it online. Sadly, it’s not the case. Birth records were not commonly done in the 19th century. Some major cities were doing them (on an optional basis) in the second half of that century, but for the most part, it did not become a common practice until well after the turn of the century. Louisiana passed a law to make it mandatory statewide in 1918, but there were still probably thousands of people, living out in the country, perhaps unable to read, who had no idea that they had to register the family births. If you’re lucky, maybe they wrote them down in the family bible, or maybe the baptismal record exists somewhere. Children were mostly born at home with a midwife, and a lot of people were either too poor or too skeptical of the government in general to bother with it. A baptismal record was an easier concept to get on board with; the Catholic Church, especially, had been doing those for ages, and for many people, your baptism, unlike your messy and painful birth, was truly the “one for the books.” People are clean and happy at baptisms. The date and time and place of your holy commitment to God was the event your mama enjoyed noting in the Baby Book. Of course, it wasn’t everyone who was Catholic, or even anything, although, “back in the day,” there was a general tendency to at least go through certain motions, if only to keep the neighbors from telling their neighbors that you were weirdos. No one wants to be the loner cat lady or the town drunk. How the loner cat lady and the town drunk feel about things, no one seems to speculate, but they do provide amusing cautionary tales, don’t they? Don’t drink everyday, don’t drink alone, don’t get too many cats, and get baptismal certificates for your babies.
I’ve been working on my genealogy on an on-again/off-again basis since 2009. I started on Ancestry.com. I loved the rush of excitement whenever I saw the little “leaf hint,” indicating a record match for someone on my tree. My first forage into the land of census records was a thrill. Here was written evidence, from a day seemingly frozen in time, that my forebears existed. And you could see, too, all the people who lived around them, in the same “ward,” occupation: farmer or welder, or teacher, preacher, or “housewife.” How different it will be for the genealogist in the distant future! Instead of farmers and housewives, the occupations will be Amazon Driver, DoorDasher, Uber, Barista!
Besides the census, of course, there is a whole other world of death records and marriage records and newspaper articles. For some ancestors, we find so much! For others, so little. And even more frustrating than the roadblocks are the people who seem to have fallen out of the sky, without even a name for the stork who delivered them! Those are the ones who make me close out the browser in exasperation and turn to a palliative phase of binge-watching some stupid show. Seriously, though, sometimes people in 1850 had reasons to dodge census workers. I mean, it wasn’t like today, where you have federal workers chasing you down with mail outs and emails and text messages. If someone wasn’t home on the day that the census taker and his horse were in your ward, well, unless Bob Next Farm confirmed that you lived there with your wife and six children, there wasn’t much the guy could do. He had other wards to go to and maybe other towns in other parishes, and his horse got thirsty and hungry. And even if he did manage to track down the grifters, it wasn’t easy to spell some people’s names. It was the wild wild west out there (besides the Civil War) and some people had thick accents, and of course, every village had at least one aggressive Head of House who would greet you with a Springfield locked and loaded. Federal workers have always had a bad rap, but, let’s face it, the workers on the 1860 Census must been a brave set of bureaucrats.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can’t find everything online. Shoot, you can’t even find everything you’d like to find in your own house. And even when you do find something, it might be moth-eaten or decayed beyond recognition. Maybe you find that death certificate from 1898, but the handwriting is so awful it was almost not worth the effort. Genealogy research doesn’t always go according to plan. You look for one thing, you find another, and then you go down a path you never foresaw. Some paths are fool’s errands, trick ponies, and false starts. Sometimes the wall is unbreakable. You hit the wall and can’t go any further. Sometimes you just have to do guesswork. Fact is stranger than fiction sometimes, and sometimes it’s impossible to know the difference. Your ancestors left you the trail they didn’t mind you following. They recorded what they were proud of. Is it so different than what we record on social media? We put our accomplishments on LinkedIn. We put our best photos on Instagram. We put our sweetest thoughts on Facebook. We tweet the funniest jokes on Twitter. That’s the trail we want our children to prize.