Brick Walls & Lost Information

There is never a guarantee in genealogy. Sometimes we will hit brick walls, sometimes it takes years of digging. 

A challenging part of being a genealogist is that sometimes there just isn't information for you to find. So many documents have been lost to fires, or thrown out because someone didn't know what they had.

The majority of documents are squirreled away in courthouses, storage, libraries, or attics and people don't realize what they have. 

Often with illiteracy, accents, and language barriers information wasn't recorded, or was recorded incorrectly. 

Handwriting may be illegible, or pages are ripped, stained, or missing. 

And sometimes people just wanted a clean break and chose to recreate themselves.  So they just disappear, or it's like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find where they came from. 

People died (especially young children) and there was never a birth or death record. 

Headstones were expensive and families often couldn't afford them. Or maybe they put a rough stone there, but now we don't realize it's symbolism. 

And there are always the challenges with family names. Often children would be named after someone, you may name your child after your favorite brother, and your brother may make his son a Jr. So you both have kids with the same name and very close in age. 

If a child died young the parents may use that name again for another child. 

Sometimes people would go by their initials to differentiate themself from others, but trying to figure out what those initials stood for can be difficult. 

Many women's names have been lost as well. They may have been called Mrs. husbands name, or referred to by only her first name and her maiden name remains unknown.