Have you had trouble finding information about your female ancestors during your genealogy research? In this post, find tips and tricks for locating the women in your family tree.
If you have spent time working on your family tree, you probably know that it is usually easier to find information about your male ancestors than the females in your family tree.
Sure, family tree research can be hard. However, it's usually harder when we start working on those female lines.
The reasons that it can be harder to find information about our great-grandmothers vs. our great-grandfathers are many.
For example, in the United States, women almost always changed their names when they got married. In fact, about 80% of women who marry men in the US change still take their husband's name.
It can be tough to research someone when we don't even know her original name.
There are a many, many other reasons that it's tough to find out more about the women in our family, especially those who lived a long time ago.
Regardless of the why, we still want to learn about our female ancestors. Below, you'll discover the methods that have worked for me in my own family tree.
Check wills and probate records
One of my favorite ways to find information about the women in my family is by reading my ancestors' wills. I will also read the wills of people who I think might be my ancestor when I am not sure.
The will below belonged to a Cornelius, who turned out not to be connected to my family. In his will, he mentions "my wife, Catherine".
Perhaps Catherine is the mother of all of his children, in which case we have identified the female ancestor on that line of the tree. We might use the name Catherine to look for additional marriage records for Cornelius, which could lead us to discover that he married her when his children were adults.
However, maybe the marriage record gave us evidence of where Cornelius lived during that period of his life, which helped us find an earlier marriage record in that same location. Perhaps this new record shows the mother of the family's children.
People often left their daughters money and property in their wills, and the daughters are usually listed with their married name. We will also sometimes see wording like, "my daughter Jennie Smith, wife of Curt Smith".
When you do find your female ancestor mentioned in a will, it can help you learn more about their relationship with their family, as well as many details about their lives.
Finding the daughters in a will can also help you make sure that you are researching the correct family. You can also add the other daughters to your family tree, even if they aren't your direct ancestors.
I always recommend building a wide family tree that includes collateral lines.
Request copies of original vital records
Many people who do most of their genealogy research online are not aware that they can usually request copies of vital records pertaining to their ancestors. We can get these records by contacting the state's vital records department and following their instructions for requesting copies.
Copies of these records usually cost between $10-20, which can add up quickly if we want to have a copy for each of our ancestors. Imagine getting a copy of every record available, including birth, marriage, and death, for each ancestor.
Some people choose to not request a copy of the full record when they can find lots of information online about their ancestor. This can be a good way to keep research costs down, since they can really add up quickly.
However, when it comes to our female ancestors - especially when we have exhausted all of the available online databases, we can often learn new information from requesting any vital record pertaining to their lives.
Find deeds and other property records
One of my favorite places to look for my female ancestors is in property records. I've had very good luck using the Family Search experimental full-text search for this purpose.
I have been able to find property transfer, mortgage, or deed records for the majority of my ancestors who owned property since the 1860s. In a large number of these cases, the wife's name is listed.
For example, the image below is from my 4th great-grandfather's mortgage in 1865. His wife's name is listed, and it even includes an alternative spelling for her name!
They were German, so I think they were using a more English-sounding "Mary", but they wanted to make sure that they recorded the German spelling of "Marie". I really appreciate this attention to detail 160 years later.
Look in old newspapers
We can often find a lot of information about our female relatives and ancestors in old newspapers. Items to look for would include academic and professional awards and achievements, letters submitted to the paper by your ancestor, and local-interest stories.
Even though men historically were the legal center of the family, women were usually the social center. For this reason, we also might often see women mentioned in old newspapers when they visited their friends and family in other communities.
We might see a snippet mentioning a luncheon held by a relative with attendees listed in the local newspaper's social column.
Follow the daughters
If you are struggling to trace your female ancestor throughout her life, especially during her later years, consider that she may have gone to live with one of her daughters.
Daughters often provided a lot of the care-giving for their elderly parents. This is especially true when a parent was widowed and would otherwise have to live alone.
Many times, daughters would have one or both of the parents come to live with them, their husband, and their family.
Be sure to research all of the children of your ancestor, paying close attention to all of the household members in each US Federal Census record. You might be able to find your elderly female ancestor living with one of her children.
If you know where she was living when she was older, this might help you learn where she may have passed. You might even be able to find a death record with even more information.
Don't skip their obituary
We often find obituaries for our accomplished male ancestors, since they may have had professional or military achievements that their families felt were important to share. We should not skip trying to find obituaries for our female ancestors.
Obituaries often include information about our female ancestor's accomplishments, too. For example, your female ancestors may have worked tirelessly as a volunteer for a local cause, or they may have had a job that you didn't know about.
Obituaries, or death notices, usually include a great deal of information about the person who passed away. They might name their parents, place of birth, surviving family members, and other facts that can help us track down additional genealogy records about their lives.
Look for middle names
If the female ancestor that you would like to learn more about was the mother of someone born before the mid-1800s, you might be able to use her children's middle names to learn her maiden name.
While not always the case, children often used their mother's maiden name as a middle name. Other times, their middle name was a surname passed down from another ancestor in their family tree.
For example, one of my ancestor's had the middle name of "Snow". As it turns out, his mother's maiden name was Snow, and her father's name was John Snow, born about 1750 in England.
Find out what family history items and documents your relatives might have
One of the best ways to find information about your female ancestors is through contacting people who are descended from them to see if any of her documents, photographs, and records were passed down in their line of her family tree.
For example, I have some items that belonged to my 4th great-grandmother. However, I know that she has lots of other descendants who might be interested in learning more about her from these items.
The other people descended from her could be as distantly related to me as my fifth cousins, which means that I don't know any of them personally. One way that my distant cousins descended from my 4th great-grandmother could find me would be by clicking through from my ancestor's profile on my Ancestry family tree.
I'm more than happy to receive messages from relatives, and I know that most other family tree researchers feel the same way.
What you could do is try to find other people online who have the female ancestor that you would like to learn more about in your family tree. Then, contact them through the site's messaging feature to see if they know anything more than what is available online about that line of your shared family tree.
Try DNA testing
Autosomal DNA is passed down to us from our ancestors in a process that does not give consideration to whether they were male or female. Companies that offer autosomal DNA tests are Ancestry, MyHeritage, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA.
These DNA test results have a feature known as DNA matches. DNA matches are our genetic relatives who also tested their DNA.
By figuring out how we are related to our DNA matches, we can learn more about our female ancestors. This is also a great way to connect with distant cousins who might have family tree information.
Conclusion
I hope that this post has helped give you ideas and inspiration about where you can look to find information about those hard-to-find female ancestors in your family tree.
If you have any questions about something that you read in this post, or if you have ideas of your own that you would like to share, I would love to hear from you in the discussion below.
Thanks for reading today!