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The following is a chapter from:
Trace Your Roots with DNA
by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak and Ann Turner
(reprinted with permission)
BEST RESOURCES FOR REVERSE GENEALOGY
Now that you're equipped with some reverse genealogy tactics, the questions that naturally springs to mind is where to start. If you've been doing genealogical research for any period of time, you're familiar with the standards, such as www.ancestry.com, and www.cyndislist.com. These are almost certainly among your bookmarks. But if your goal is to try to locate a DNA testing participant, which resources will help you find him the quickest?
Through our extensive tracing experience, we have learned that no two situations are alike, so the resources used may vary widely. Still, we realize there were certain "old reliable" we turned to over and over in these quests, but we were hard pressed to rank the top performers - the ones that were the most essential to success. So we decided to conduct an experiment.
We randomly selected 10 cases we had worked on and retraced the research trail, logging the resources that had been used in each one. All cases involved the use of several resources, and given a tool may have been used consulted multiple times. To simply matters, we counted a resource only once for each case in which it contributed to the solution. A convenient ranking quickly emerged, as can be seen in Figure 8-4.
EVERY-NAME CENSUS
The clear-cut superstar is the digitized, 1930 every-name census index (available for a fee at ancestry.com), with the 1880 (available at www.familysearch.org and www.ancestry.com) playing a supporting role. This tool was a key ingredient in 80 percent of the cases we analyzed.
With the ability to use multiple variables (state, age, place of birth etc.) as well as wildcard spellings to zero in on your target - one among its 124 million entries - the 1930 census is an indispensable resource. And since everyone in the family is listed, it's a potential surround-and-conquer weapon for finding additional names to pursue. Of course, its true value, as alluded to earlier, stems from its recency. When you find a name here - particularly a child - you're already dealing with someone who may well be alive. And if they are deceased, odds are that they lived long enough to leave a trace in the SSDI.
Figure 8-4: Best reverse genealogy resources
| Rank |
Resource |
Frequency of Use (%) |
| 1 |
Every-name census (1930, 1880, 1870, 1860) |
80 |
| 2 |
Online lineage collections |
70 |
| 3 |
Online phone directors |
60 |
| 4 |
Social Security Death Index |
50 |
| 5 |
Online State Vital Records |
40 |
| 6 |
Other census indexes (e.g. 1900, 1910, 1920, etc) |
30 |
| 7 |
Search engine (e.g. Google, etc.) |
20 |
| 8 |
Other sources (e.g., newspapers, real estate, etc.) |
20 |
The 1880 census is also very powerful due to the fact that all 51 million entries have been indexed, rather than just the heads-of-household as is the case with most census records. In fact, the 1880 and 1930 censuses often work well in tandem. If you can find someone as a child in the 1880 census, you can often find him as a 50-something in the 1930 census, enabling you to almost instantly leap half a century forward in time. Recently the 1870 and 1860 censuses were also completely indexed and may prove almost as useful.
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