What you should not use is another person's family tree, except maybe to kick-start your research or, if you can't find anything, to use as a hint. That is how many budding family historians (including myself) started out. Pretty soon you will have seven year olds or ninety-seven year olds fathering children as you pick up all the faux pas people have made. Having said that, don't trust my research either, except, as noted above, to use it as a segue. Find yourself a good family tree program and start building with yourself (or an ancestor you especially want to research - I used Daniel Holmes as my home person in one tree). I use Family Tree Maker (ancestry.com), but it is costly. If you want to try it out, but are not sure you will be interested enough to go very far with it, you could build your tree on familysearch.com and see how it goes before investing. Family Tree has changed and is now a great source of original documents and transcriptions. One friend of mine subscribes to an old newspaper website which she finds helpful and worth the expense.
I do most of my research on-line, but there is no substitute for the thrill of actually going to an archives and thumbing through old tomes and finding your ancestor's name on the page. Nowadays, many copies of those old tomes are on the internet. Whatever the source, try your best to find the original, not the transcription. Until you begin your research, you have no idea how many errors you will find in transcriptions, even if you are a beginner. That's mainly because the writing is hard to read, but you know for a fact that great-grandpa's name was Moore, not Hoar or Warren or something totally different. Spelling way back when was not as important as it was when I was I growing up.
Now, on to Ralph P Dick.
Where do I begin? I started by opening three windows: my ancestry.com, familysearch, and PANB (New Brunswick archives). I typed in "Ralph P Dick" and the fact that he lived at one time in Saint John, New Brunswick. That was all I knew. Sometimes you will strike the pot of gold on the first try, but more often than not, you will have to dig and dig and dig. Put your findings in a sieve, give them a good shake, and sort them out. I never heard "Dick" used as a last name, but I found out there were lots of Dicks, lots of Ralph Dicks in the world, and in New Brunswick, two Ralph Dicks. Fortunately, Ralph B Dick was about thirty years younger than Ralph P Dick. After I found what I could about Ralph on ancestry, I went to the other two websites I mentioned and repeated the process. Also, it's a good idea to google the name of the individual you are researching. If they had some claim to fame, they might show up. If there are several people by the same name, I find it helpful to narrow my search by Census, or Military, or Newspaper, etcetra.
What do I look for? I look, first, for dates: birth, marriage, death. Since Ralph was probably in New Brunswick, I looked at PANB first. New Brunswick has a great archival site; unfortunately, Manitoba does not. But I am getting ahead of myself. I didn't find Ralph on PANB, but vital records were not necessarily kept when Ralph was born. So, I typed in just "Dick." and sorted through all the "Dicks." I found a John Q Dick, born in Saint John, with parents John M Dick and Elizabeth W Leavitt. Type in "John M Dick." Hmmmm . . . he's born in Bathurst. Could he be the father of Ralph? Try it out at ancestry or familysearch and see? Yes, there, in the 1891 and 1901 Census, is the John M Dick family: I have a match (after several mixes and sieves). But there, the story seems to come to an end, which is what we consider a Brick Wall. We need to hammer it down, bit by bit, piece by piece. It takes time.
What did I find? I decided, in this case, to research all of Ralph's siblings. What I found confused me, although after researching since about 2005, not much surprises me. I am amazed at the distances people traveled back in the day, and where they ended up. Ralph had eight siblings. I followed the process for each sibling as well as the two parents. Was the John Dick who died as the result of falling down the stairs, the father of Ralph et al? I am convinced, after checking out several sources, that he was. But as there were several John Dicks, I had to be careful. But what's this? A lead for a Ralph Dick crossing the border from British Columbia into Sumas, Washington. My Ralph? Check out the City Directories. Seems there were a lot of Dicks in Seattle. If I wanted to go further with my research, I would check out all those Dicks to see if the widow, Elizabeth Dick, went to stay with family after her husband's untimely demise. Elizabeth, their mother, went there with two of her sons, John Q and Ralph P.That is what I mean by using a segue. Genealogy is, in my opinion, an idea, followed by a hypothesis, and hopefully completed with the proving or disproving of your hypothesis: a mathemathical process, all based on good, sound research and citations. If you are not positive, say so in the notes box on your tree or the book you are writing.
Using Ralph P Dick as my example, and not finding as much as I would like but enough to write a blurb about him, this is what I was able to piece together. Like I said, if he were in my tree, I'd probably dig some more. I don't know if he married and fathered children, or why he died so young. I could pay the Manitoba archives for a copy of his death certificate, which would probably help me with some of those details, but I don't want to know that badly.
I found Ralph's date of birth on the 1901 census. I also found out that he had eight siblings, and that he was a twin. I verified that with the 1891 census. I found his paternal grandparents, who were married in Quebec and then appeared in Bathurst, New Brunswick, on census records. I found that John and Bessie gave all of their children family names as their middle names. There were two with the middle name "Grey," two with "Montgomery," and two with "Leavitt." That caused me a wonder: what did the P in Ralph's middle name represent. Checking on his grandparents, James and Matilda Dick, I found that Matilda's father was Ralph Pritchard. Was that Ralph's "P"? Yes, indeed, it was. And that was the clue that led me to the Manitoba Death Index. But all that the Province of Manitoba will allow me to see is the transcription, which includes his age at death, his approximate birth year, his death date and place. Small comfort, but since the name is so unusual, I feel fairly confident that this is my Ralph P.
The other thing I took note of, in researching Ralph's siblings, is that most of them left New Brunswick and scattered. Even Elizabeth left for a time, although she did return home, lived with her daughter, and died at her daughter's home in Saint John. She is buried in the Fernhill Cemetery, where my Uncle Bryce and Aunt Inez are buried. The inhabitants of the Fernhill Cemetary are not listed on line, so if ever I go to Saint John, I might go and have a visit with Uncle Bryce and Aunt Inez and Mrs. Elizabeth Wiggins Leavitt Dick, and see if Mrs. Dick is buried beside Mr. Dick. But for now, I am left with the wonder, what happened to Ralph? Why did he die so young? Why can't I find his WWI Draft Registration or Attestation papers? Perhaps he was not healty? Did he marry? Unfortunately, I will never know, for I am through researching Ralph and I must move on: to J W Gifford of Portage Vale. Sigh . . . what does J W represent? Worse yet . . . my great-grandmother, as did others, signed Mrs. Chas. Holmes. Phoebe . . . she is Phoebe. Peggy . . . I am Peggy . . . not Mrs. Bill, even tho' I am Mrs. Bill.
My last task is to write up a blurb about Ralph in my Riverbank Visitors book. In one of my how - to books on researching and writing family history, I read, and I paraphrase . . . "know much more than you write." That is difficult for me, but a good editor helps. I had a good editor. In fact, she is still editing . . . this blog! Even tho' I didn't ask her too. I understand, it just has to be. It's in the genes. I have a good editor.
That was a long lesson, and I may have lost most of you before I came to this concluding paragraph. If you are not interested in the process of researching your history, or even reading your history that someone else has researched and written, I probably lost you after the first couple of paragraphs. But, if you are interested, I hope you found my lesson helpful, and if you are a fellow researcher, I hope you will share some additional ideas in your comments.
How fun it is to follow people who never would have dreamed it could one day be possible. Historical stalking? Paula
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