The One Place Study as a Research Tool

To correlate evidence, you must have evidence to correlate. Typical researchers stop too soon in their evidence collection, believing they have found all there is to find about a soldier. There is more to military research than the compiled military service record or the pension application file. A reasonably exhaustive search is not limited to the two or three typical record sources.

The laws our ancestors lived by can tell us much about life in earlier times. Finding those laws, and the stories they tell, can be a daunting task, but—from colonial statutes to today, from the halls of Congress to the statehouses of 50 states—the choices legislators made about what laws were needed give a rich and deep context to family history.

In 1906, Nellie Langevin married Frank Henry Hill in Penacook, New Hampshire. Frank vanished three years later, leaving Nellie to fend for herself. Despite her efforts to divorce him, Nellie died in 1914, still officially married. Who was Nellie’s elusive husband and what happened to him? This case study resolves conflicting direct, indirect, and negative evidence to uncover Frank’s identity and highlights the importance of including the FAN Club in reasonably exhaustive research.

One James C. Ward was born in the 1820s and his life is documented in Massachusetts and New York. One James C. Ward served in the Mexican War and left sketches and a diary detailing his adventures in California in the 1840s. Could they be the same man? A case of identity solved through correlation.

Imagine uncovering the stories hidden in your ancestors’ land entry papers from the Homestead Act of 1862 and later homestead laws. The material in these files will add richness to your family history. Join us as we discover potential homesteading ancestors, explore the journey of making a claim, understand the different homestead laws, and learn to access these records. Each document holds clues waiting to unfold the story of your family’s past.

Incorporating social context in a Kinship-Determination Project isn’t just about weaving historical events and descriptions of daily life into a family narrative. Community and culture shape behavior and relationships. To understand and document our ancestors, we need to understand the society in which they lived. When we estimate a marriage date based the birth of a couple’s first child (or that the birth of a child implies a marriage), we base those assumptions on context. This lecture will explore social context and illustrate how to research and write about it within a Kinship-Determination Project.