Research, FTM, Maps

I've been hunting through census records, working on my Hall line. As you know, the records from 1790 - 1840 only list the head of household name. I've been trying to match up all those little chicken scratches with known family members. I keep getting totals that don't add up. A child is missing. There are two more children than I expected. Entire families are hiding.

A good deal of what I know about the descendants of William Hall and Ruhamah Andrews comes from the surrogate record of their granddaughter, Laura Carter, which states:

Your petitioners have made diligent inquiry from descendants surviving relatives, known to them, to ascertain the names and residences of said decedents surviving relatives, but cannot ascertain them all.

I've already found mistakes with some of the relationships and names listed. I now believe that the Percy Cook listed was Pierce G Cook, based on information from Pierce's descendants. To complicate matters Pierce married Ursula Hall, who is not named in the surrogate record but is believed to be another descendant. Was she left out because she was married to a descendant and therefore it was unnecessary to list her separately? Was she simply overlooked? Or do we have her from the wrong Hall family?

I put my Hall tree up at Ancestry so my cousins could access it and I've found it much easier and faster to work on the tree online, so I guess I'm going to go with FTM 2010. At $40 it will have to wait until I start earning a paycheck again.

I had originally made the tree private and have now switched it to public in hopes of making a connection with someone who has more answers than I. It has been a couple of days now and it is still showing up in searches as private so I don't know how long it will be before others can see it and maybe make connections. (It is listed as public with a link from my profile page.) I have accepted many "Ancestry hints" of other trees, hoping that the new Member Connect function will alert me if those trees add something new and hopefully helpful.

I'm also loving that you can attach census records from certain years to an entire family at once. You do need to be careful that you're not adding duplicate individuals. For lines that are new to me it even adds spouses and children, so I can add several people in a minute or two rather then the 30 minutes it would have taken me on FTM 2008. Again, this feature must be used with caution.

Having had distant cousins contact me about a line I haven't worked on in a long time has really helped me see where I have mistakes and missing information.

In trying to locate some individuals in the census I have been looking in places where other family members were found. About 1830 the family really started to scatter so I have started on a google map that shows who was where when. Take a look and let me know what you think. Should I have created a separate map for each decade?


View Hall Family Migration in a larger map