Brick Walls

Genealogy is not a hobby for the impatient. There is no instant gratification. Answers only come in time, my friends. In my thirty years of genealogy research, the biggest frustration of my fellow hobbyists has been hitting the proverbial "brick wall." This usually means that the researcher has run out of obvious leads and is beginning to gnaw on his/her foot in despair. The necessary lead might take twenty or thirty years to appear, just like you see on the tv show "Cold Case."

In my case, I conducted family interviews and collected birth and death records back in the 1970s and 1980s. I did what additional research I could, even paying a genealogy society in Ireland to check their records. Leads dried up twenty years ago. The wall finally began to break down last year, when Ancestry started posting more passenger ship records from the 20th century. I finally found a slew of crew listings showing my grandfather's brother George as a night watchman aboard United States Lines passenger ships, something I knew from interviews but couldn't document before. Lo and behold, George listed two of his sisters as next of kin, showing married names and addresses! With that information I was able to search the 1930 Federal Census, get names and ages for each sister and their children and find precise birth and death dates using the Social Security Death Index. I used the death records to request free copies of obituaries from a local public library. The obituaries provided another sibling living in Glasgow, Scotland. I've requested a copy of one siblings Social Security application to confirm the siblings' parents' names. After thirty years of searching, I expect to be virtually chasing my line back to Ireland sometime this summer.

In this Information Age, there will eventually be a revelation of much needed data. The trick is in the waiting. If I had put my genealogy work aside, I would have never made the connection I'm about to make. My approach was not to struggle fruitlessly against my brick wall but to develop my genealogy hobby more broadly, always checking on my relatives now and then but not obsessing on them. Carr surname research became my hobby, giving me a reason to stay in the game for many years and not give up hope. I still have a Carr brick wall to overcome, but it will be resolved -- eventually.