Sit down with the details you have on your ancestor’s family and create a research plan so you can be methodical and keep up with what and where you search (so you don’t repeat yourself). Sources can become available and/or you can learn how to research better and more efficiently and that may change your assessment of who your ancestors were and where they were.

Your research should always be as good as it can be at the moment, but don’t think it is written in stone. Trust me on this, ALL family historians start out with enough excitement, lack of knowledge, or both, to make lots of mistakes. Be methodical, don’t get in a hurry to collect names. The more you know in the line that you must move back in time, the better chance you have at finding a clear record or be able to do a comprehensive assessment that would meet the genealogical proof standard. Related families moved together and children were often named for siblings, aunts and uncles, and grandparents on both sides of their parents. That means doing everything you can to identify names and dates for all children and for the new incoming line brought by your female ancestor in the family. Always record conflicting information either as an alternative entry in your genealogy software or in your research plan/journal. Be comprehensive in researching all available records and document complete names and dates. Always research the whole family in each generation. I’ve said this a few dozen times in these blogs and at the risk of repeating myself, I will repeat myself. There is no guarantee that any of these will answer your question, but we will talk about that possibility as well. How do you go about separating one John Smith from the six (or 36) other John Smiths that crop up when you do a general online search? Let’s explore some good tools to use. The real joy comes when you are moving back in time and you don’t know where they exactly lived before and you suddenly have way too many choices.

On top of our ancestors’ predisposition to use the same given names in each generation, we also have the likelihood that families who at least at the moment appear to have no connection to our ancestors also occasionally used the same given name. If you’ve been doing genealogy/family history for a while and have managed to move back at least two generations, filling in all of the children in each generation, you’ve discovered what I would consider the bane of any dedicated family historian: the repetition of given names leading to way too many folks with the same name.

Onenote vs evernote for genealogy