Backdoor Genealogy

How often have you run into a brick wall in your family history research? Silly question, I bet. Which brings me to one of my absolutely favorite uses for online genealogy - the backdoor approach. Cluster genealogy on steroids is the way I like to think of it, although many of you probably use this backdoor technique on a regular basis. Basically, you utilize the power of searchable online databases to investigate all possible family connections for your ancestor, including relatives that you may not already know about. The ability to search across the records of an entire state (or even country) at once, plus search on fields such as occupation or parents' names not present in a traditional index, offers unique research options that just aren't practical in the world of genealogy archives, libraries and microfilm.

What do you do, for example, when every surname variation that you can come up with doesn't turn up your ancestor in the census? A common census search technique used by many online genealogists is to search by first name only, in combination with the approximate date and place of birth (or other search fields as necessary to bring the results down to a reasonable number to wade through). For more recent census records where household members are indexed, I often search by the first name of one of the children, along with the first name of a parent (first the mother, and then the father). This technique can be especially helpful when the family is not living in the area where you expect them, or in cases where a woman may have lost her husband and then remarried (and possibly even lost the second husband) all within the 10 year gap between census enumerations (especially when the children of the first husband took the name of the second upon their mother's remarriage).

Alternatively, consider a situation where you're trying to track down the married name of your ancestor's sister. Often you'll find she married in the area where her family lived, or discover her in an online marriage index. But when that doesn't work, one of the many online death indexes may come to the rescue. Search databases such as Georgia Deaths, 1914-1927 (free at pilot.familysearch.org) by parents' names, or the California Death Index (available by subscription at Ancestry.com) with the combination of the sister's first name and mother's maiden name, and you just may locate these errant married female siblings. This is also a good way to locate family members you may not have previously known about, such as siblings who were born and then either died or moved out of the household between census years.

Using batch numbers and parents' names to search for family baptisms in the International Genealogical Index (IGI) at FamilySearch.org is yet another type of backdoor technique commonly employed by genealogists. Because a "batch" often includes the records from a particular parish (or at least a portion of them), searching for the mother's name, father's name, or both may turn up several baptisms of the couple's children. To locate the appropriate batch number(s) for your parish of interest you can use a Web site such as Hugh Wallis' IGI Batch Numbers - British Isles and North America. Alternatively, if you locate a baptism for your ancestor in the IGI, click on the batch number on the results page to search that batch for additional family members.

What great examples of using online databases for "backdoor genealogy" do you have to share? Please post them in the comments below, or post them on your blog and share the link in the comments so we can all benefit from each other's creative searching.