The Ultimate Challenge - Building a Family Tree From Sources - Post 4: Westfall Family

Noted geneablogger James Tanner wrote Building a Pedigree From Sources -- The Ultimate Challengeon his Genealogy's Star blog on 22 November 2014.  See the post for more background.

I wrote The Ultimate Challenge - Building a Family Tree From Sources - Post 1: Crawford Family on Monday,  I was able to take the paternal half of the ancestry of Betty Lee Crawford back four more generations using only Ancestry.com leaf Hints and judgment.  On Tuesday, I wrote The Ultimate Challenge - Building a Family Tree From Sources - Post 2: Meyers Family and was unable to find any other records about the three known persons in the census record.  On Wednesday, I wrote The Ultimate Challenge - Building a Family Tree From Sources - Post 3: Alford Family, and was able to expand the family tree only by doing a search in other Ancestry.com records, but only for the father of the family.

1)  In this post, I'm going to try to do the same thing with another family - the Louise L. Alford family - in the 1940 U.S. Census.  I used a neighbor of my great-grandparents in San Diego, California - they lived across the street at 2108 30th Street.

Here is a screen shot of the census page from Ancestry.com:

I have highlighted Joanne W. Westfal in the screen above.  She was indexed as Joan ME W. Westfal.

The persons in this family are:

*  Gerald F. Westfal - head, male, white, age 49, married, born California
*  Katherine A. Westfal - wife, female, white, age 47, married, born California
*  Joanne Westfal - daughter, female, white, age 15, single, born California

2)  After entering Gerald, Katherine and Joanne into the Ancestry Member Tree, I had several green leaf Hints, and those led me to a fairly well populated family tree.  After about two hours of effort, here is the Family view of the tree with Joanne Westfall as the starting person:

Joanne's Pedigree View chart looks like this, with 12 of the 16 second great-grandparents identified:

I didn't go any further back on the 12 lines.  I didn't do any searches for more Hints, except as noted below.

3)  I did a search for Joanne Westfall, and found a birth record and a death record for her in California.  These were not provided by Hints, but by a search, perhaps due to the indexing of her first name.

4)  So I've done four of these "Ultimate Challenge" searches, and I had a good experience with the first one, a total shutout with the second, had to search to succeed on the third one, and had a good experience with the fourth one.  

To obtain a decent statistical percentage of tests like this - i.e., to be able to say that Ancestry leaf Hints can be used to find your ancestry 67.4% of the time - I would have to do several hundred.  Right now the number is 75% plus or minus about 15%.

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Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver