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%.
The URL for this post is:
Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver
Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021.
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