Old Newspapers

Tricks for Finding the Unknown Burial Location of an Ancestor

Tricks for Finding the Unknown Burial Location of an Ancestor

Discovering the burial location of your ancestors is an important part of genealogy. Knowing where the burial location is (and visiting it, if possible) gives you a deeper insight into your family in past generations, gives you a place to go to honor your ancestor, and puts you as close to them physically as you will ever be. Often, the burial location is obvious, even if it’s not marked. There will be spaces between the headstones of other ancestors, often with indentations in the ground where the coffin underneath has collapsed over the years. Family lore may have handed down the location. It can be easy to find, and often is. However, you will sometimes come across an ancestor whose burial location seems a complete mystery. This doesn’t mean you can’t find it. Here are three ways you can discover the hidden burial locations of your ancestors.

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Alternative Sources for Tracking Your Ancestors: City Directories, Social Sections of Old Newspapers, and School Yearbooks

Alternative Sources for Tracking Your Ancestors

If your ancestors aren’t showing up in the census, if there is a gap in the census years in which they appear, or you have run out of obvious sources for looking for them, don’t abandon that line of research just yet. There are plenty of alternative sources you can use to tease out more information about your ancestors. Here are some of the best alternative sources to use, how to use them, and where to find them.

1. City Directories

Even before there was the telephone, there were city directories. Back before the telephone, city directories listed a person’s address, and sometimes their profession and other people who were living in their house with them. New directories were usually put out every year for most cities, and even some small towns published them. These are a good source of information on your ancestors in between census years, and can sometimes even allow you to discover new family members who are not mentioned in any other sources (such as small children who did not live beyond young childhood, or elderly in-laws whose surname you did not previously know.

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How To Solve The Biggest Problems In Your Genealogy Research

How To Solve The Biggest Problems In Your Genealogy Research

Every genealogist will eventually encounter a particularly troublesome problem in their research. In genealogical circles, this is called the brick wall. It is when you reach a point in your research where you are out of available or known records to search, you’ve made all of the reasonable assumptions about your problem that you can with the information you have available, and you still can’t come up with even a theoretical solution that would pass the genealogical proof standard test. Brick walls are the nemeses of genealogists. However, they can be as challenging and exciting as they are frustrating, because one thing we genealogists love is solving a good mystery. Most genealogists can’t stand to just sit there staring at the brick wall. They’re determined to bring it down one way or the other, even if it takes decades (and sometimes it does!).

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