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News: The Brick Wall

The Brick Wall

By Tony McCarthy

Word of mouth is the best source of family history.  We all depend on it to point us in the right direction when first starting out on our search for ancestors.  Oral history is usually readily available within the family, it’s free, and gives us the personal detail which can never be squeezed out of census returns, parish registers and such.  The wise genealogist exhausts word of mouth as a source before turning to documents.

The drawback of word of mouth is that it does not take us back very far in time.  Most people can provide information about their parents and grandparents, but beyond that, unless they took a special interest in family history, they can be of no further assistance.  If you start your family history research when young, grandparents, granduncles and grandaunts may be available.  By divulging the normal stock of genealogical information, they can take you back two further generations ─ your grandparent’s grandparents are your great-great grandparents ─ enabling you to compile a five generation family tree without looking at a single document.

Documents

When you have gathered whatever genealogical information people can provide from memory, further progress depends on what you can learn from documents.  The standard genealogical sources that most researchers consult include Census Returns, Vital Statistics, Testamentary Records, Church Registers, Valuation Records, Tithe Records, Registry of Deeds, Estate Records, and Graveyard Inscriptions.  These sources were created at different times and for reasons which did not include facilitating future genealogical research. 

In order to extract useful information from these sources, it is important to have some background knowledge of the various collections.  You need to know why the information was gathered, what administrative divisions were used, whether the records are indexed, where they are stored, whether copies are available elsewhere, and so on.

Eventually, with persistent and methodical research, you will glean all the information recorded in the standard sources about your ancestors.  If your impulse to uncover your roots still persists at this point, you must engage in more specialised and painstaking digging to make more progress.  Usually, the information you have already gathered will point you in particular directions.  The location, religion, social class, level of education and occupation of an ancestor all suggest further avenues of research in more obscure record collections.

In time, you will have examined all sources, both standard and specialised.  Often in this situation, though you know of no more sources to tap into, your appetite for ancestral knowledge has been whetted rather than satisfied by your researches.  At this point, people tend to describe their frustrating predicament as having hit the brick wall. 

The Nature of the Brick Wall

The idea of the brick wall is self-explanatory: you can locate no more documents with references to your ancestors.  The brick wall is the inevitable destination of the most competent and dedicated  genealogist, because at some stage there is simply nothing more to find.  Obviously, if you have found out all there is, your research is complete.  The two options left to you are either to spend your time doing the job most genealogists tend to neglect, that is, to use the information you have collected to produce a family history and distribute copies to all of your relations; or take up another hobby.

However, there is always the uneasy feeling that the brick wall is a mirage, and that you would discover more if only you knew where to look.  In fact, this is what most people mean by the brick wall.  When researchers use the term in letters to publications like Irish Roots magazine, it is not to acknowledge that they have reached the end of the road, rather, it is an appeal to readers for a genealogical bulldozer to clear the blockage.

Often, the barrier to further progress may be the result of a narrow focus on a small segment of ancestry to the exclusion of all others.  Those who concentrate on researching a single line ─ typically the paternal line ─ may get stuck because the ancestors they are researching belonged to a social group which did not generate much paperwork.  Such a selective approach to research fails to take advantage of the fact that, as we go back in time, the number of our ancestors doubles with each preceding generation: we have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, etc.  While documentation becomes scarcer the further back we go, the doubling of our ancestors doubles the probability of some of that rare documentation applying to one of our forebears.  It is not reasonable to say that you have hit the brick wall if you have ignored most of your ancestors.  Simple biology teaches us that the male and female contribute an equal amount of genetic material to their offspring.  Every one of our ancestors was crucial to our existence so, logically, they all deserve equal attention.  T

Family Circle Chart

A filled-in family circle chart allows you to see all of you ancestry at a glance.  You write your own name in the central circle.  The second circle is divided into two segments for the names of your parents; the third section has four segments for your four grandparents.  And so it continues, right out to seventh and outermost circle which is divided into 64 segments, one for each of your great-great-great-great grandparents.  The diagram should make it clear that when you encounter a brick wall, it blocks only one of the many roads into the past.

Genealogical Ambitions

Despite the fact that, from a biological point of view, all of our ancestors were of equal importance, researchers have preferences.  Many descendants of the Irish Diaspora, for instance, have a burning ambition to find the spot in Ireland from which the immigrant ancestor left.  Such people may have many other ancestral lines they could research more productively, but finding the Irish homestead is often a lifelong dream.

People of Huguenot or Palatine descent long to find the town or village in France or Germany from which their exotic ancestor came.  Others have more individual ambitions.  An unusual surname among the standard issue of Murphys and Kellys draws research in that direction; particularly if accompanied by an unverified story that came with it down the generations.  Certainly, some brick walls are more frustrating than others and the advice to simply move on to research a more promising line is hard to follow.  However, the ambitions referred to above are relatively minor compared to the Holy Grail of genealogy: Descent from Antiquity.

The Ultimate Ambition: Descent from Antiquity

Despite many attempts, nobody has ever managed to construct a generation by generation family tree that convincingly shows the descent of people currently alive from people who lived in antiquity.  The challenge is to start with a person alive on or before 313: the year the Roman Emperor Constantine legalised Christianity.  In other words, to prove descent from a person born in the pre-Christian Roman Empire.  However, descent from a person born in the late Roman Empire, up to the fifth century AD, would do nicely!

It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the family tree of an Irish person could stretch back that far.  Our stock of ancient genealogies is very extensive, but to make a connection from the present time is very difficult.

Future Articles

This article attempted to define more clearly the nature of the brick wall.  Future articles will consider ways of getting past it.

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