Brick Wall Ahead - Or Why I Stopped Researching My Family Tree

For most of us, researching our family tree is no easy task. While there may be a lot of resources and tools available to the amateur researcher, sometimes the information just isn't there. Record keeping of yesteryear was scarce at best, totally absent at worst. Often we're forced to rely on oral histories from the people who were there and saw what happened as it unfolded. But as people age and people die - so do the histories. Many times, we just hit a brick wall within our search and are forced to either detour or give up.

Give up.

That's what I did after spending many hours spread out over many years researching my mother's paternal lineage. My mother's father died when she was nine and, by that time, his parents had already passed, too. From what I gathered, she didn't have many dealings with his family so she wasn't privy to the whos and whens. When I started my search, my grandmother had also already passed so there weren't many people left to ask. Actually - there was nobody left to ask. So I took the bits and pieces I had gleaned over the years and sent a plea to the universe (via the Internet) in hopes that some light would be shed at the end of my tunnel.

I was armed with his Social Security number, (supposed)parents' names, birthday, date and place of his death, even his place of burial - and I still could not locate any information on this man...and it was in the 1940s when he died. He wasn't even listed in the Social Security Death Index. But I trudged on. I was sure he would turn up somewhere. He had lived. My mother was proof, right?

There was some speculation that this man's mother had some 'dealings' in places other than her marital bed and that he was the product of some of those dealings. I kept entering names and places - the same names and places over and over - and one day, something that looked like it might be a flash of light in my tunnel appeared on my computer screen. A man was researching the same line as I was and he had some inside family information by way of the mother, if I wanted it. Oh. I.wanted.it.

As it turned out, she married one guy and had three kids with him. I don't know if he died, ran away, disappeared, or stood by and watched - but a few years later, she had three more kids...courtesy of his brother. Of course, being that it was the same last name as her husband, she never made it 'official' and got married. They just lived on as a family of the same name. Nobody knows where these two brothers came from or what ever became of them. Needless to say, my tunnel never saw the light of day again.

From time to time, I still peek and poke around, trying to glean something else..anything else that would tell me even where these guys came from. Nobody knows! There's just no record of them. I do have my own theory, though. I believe the names they were using at the time they produced the offspring that led to me were not their birth names. I believe they were running from something, fled to my ancestral home, changed their names, and started over. The law? People that wanted them dead? Other wives and children?

Who knows?

Please...tell me who knows!