Do you have an ancestor with a very common name? This can make finding records about them seem impossible! In this post, find out ways to overcome this research challenge.
The common names that you will encounter in your tree will vary depending on where your ancestors were from. For example, millions of people in the United States have the last name of Smith.
In Germany and France, the most common last names are Müller and Martin, respectively. In Mexico, you will encounter many people with the last name of Hernandez, with about 1 in 25 people having this surname.
More than 100 million people in the world have Wang as a last name, with most of them living in China. In the UK, we see lots of Smith, Johnson, Williams and Brown.
It makes matters even more complicated when the common last name is paired with a popular first name. In the US, we see lots of William, George, Thomas, James, Robert, John, Paul, Sarah, Elizabeth, Ann, Mary, among many others.
I have encountered common names among my own ancestors, and it can be very frustrating. Some examples of the common names that have had me stumped are Robert and John Parker, Thomas Thompson, David Bates, Elizabeth Robinson, David Bates, Janet Wilson, John Taylor, and more.
I could go on all day. But we should get started learning how to find out more about your ancestor despite their common name.
What to do when you do a search for your ancestor and you get hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of potential results? How can you learn more about your ancestor, who was certainly a unique and special person, despite their common name?
Compare records to what you already know
The first thing you can do is compare the genealogy records you see when you search with the information that you already know about your ancestor. Details like location, year, other names on the record, and others, can help us figure out whether a record belongs to our ancestor or not.
For example, even if I know that my ancestor, Robert Parker, was born in Groton, Massachusetts, I will be skeptical if I see a marriage record in Billerica, MA. This is because I know he was living in New Hampshire before he was married.
Read the entire original record
When our ancestors have common names, we have to make sure to click through search results to examine the original record, unless we are sure that the record can't possibly belong to our ancestor.
This is because we might spot a detail in the original record that hasn't been indexed (i.e. it doesn't show up in search results) that might provide a clue that the record is connected to our ancestor.
For example, if we see a will or probate record for someone with our ancestor's name and the year and location seem to match, we can read the will to see if we recognize any family members mentioned in the will. When we do find a will that belonged to our ancestors, this is a great way to get information about their children.
Vary your search strategies
You can leverage the power of technology in your research by varying the search queries that you use. This is especially helpful used in combination with the different filter and sort options that are available on sites like Ancestry.
For example, if you often prefer to do specific searches in order to weed out record and make your search easier, you could be missing records that really do belong to your ancestor. Try to do a more broad search by removing some of the details from your search.
For example, if you do a search about an ancestor on Ancestry, it often pre-fills in the information about the ancestor in the search (if they are already in your family tree). I sometimes will open up a new search and manually enter in only the basic details about my ancestor to see if relevant records are being left out of results due to my search being "too narrow".
Sometimes, however, narrow is good. You can try to use the search capabilities on the website that you use to limit your research results to only records from a specific collection of documents, or a particular part of the world or country.
Try the Experimental Full Text Search
Family Search has a neat tool called the Experimental Full Text Search, which has been super helpful for me in finding some of my trickiest ancestors. Things like property and probate records have been extremely useful.
The reason that this tool is special is because it uses AI to "read" everything on the page and make it searchable. You can search for names and locations, but you can also add additional keywords, such as someone else's name.
This is a great way to find someone with a common name if they have a spouse or other relative with a less common name.
Research the entire family
Another great tip is to research the entire family as a complete entity, instead of just looking for an individual person. This way, you will be able to make sure that you have found the right person because all of the other family members match other records.
For example, if you know that John Smith had a wife named Sarah, it might be hard to find John and Sarah Smith's marriage records. However, if you know that they had a sons named Edwin and Erastus, you could look for census records where the entire family is listed.
Then, you could see if you could find a marriage record in the place where they were listed as living when the census was taken.
Don't ignore collateral lines
Siblings of our ancestors and their descendants are called collateral lines of our family tree. They are related to us, and researching them can help us find out about our ancestors.
Your relative with a common name might have had a brother with a less common name, or a sister who married a man with an uncommon name. Researching John Smith's brother, Leonard, might be easier.
You might have luck with John's sister, Anna, who married a man with the last name of Chard. Anna Chard may have taken care of her parents when they were older, which can help you find the parents of John Smith, when you otherwise might not have been able to.
Try cluster genealogy
Cluster genealogy is a research strategy that you can use when you have lots of people in the same community with the same surname, or even similar full names. The idea is to research everyone in the "cluster" in order to figure out how they all connect with each other.
If you have multiple people with the last name of Parker in a town, and more than one Robert Parker (your ancestor), you could try to identify each Parker family and whether/how they are connected to each other. You would find a spouse for each Robert Parker, and figure out who their parents and children are.
Once you are done researching the cluster, you should have a pretty good idea as to which Parker family you belong to.
Take a DNA test
If you haven't already tested your DNA, this can be very helpful for breaking through really tough puzzles, including how to know which family you belong to when everyone has the same last name.
I took a DNA test pretty early on in my family history research, and my DNA results (specifically, DNA matches) have been very helpful to me. They helped me identify my mother's paternal grandmother's parents, which allowed me to perform more traditional genealogy research going back much further on her line.
This ancestor's maiden name is MacDonald, which made it pretty hard to find records about her. There are many, many people with this same name and I would have been lost without my DNA results.
As it turns out, even though my ancestor's name is common, my DNA connected me to specific people in my MacDonald family. There was no doubt about which MacDonalds I am related to.
Know when to accept defeat
Occasionally, we might have to accept that we won't be able to learn more about a line of our family tree.
I have an ancestor named Hannah Smith who was born in Connecticut in 1753. Even though the population of New England was much smaller in the mid-1700s than it is today, there were still hundreds of families with the last name of Smith.
I haven't yet tried cluster genealogy on the Smith families in Salisbury, Connecticut who lived during her time there, but I might.
If I don't get far using cluster genealogy, and I can't find a will mentioning daughter Hannah (or her husband), I might have to give up on ever knowing who her parents were.
When it comes to people who lived a very long time ago, and especially those people with common names, we can never be sure that one of the few records that do exist from that time was actually related to our ancestor.
For example, many people might have an ancestor named John Smith who was born in the 1600s. There are an untold number of John Smiths from this era.
If we find a record for a John Smith from the 1600s, how can we know that it's our John Smith? There may have been 1,000 John Smiths, and only some of them had documentation created about them, with even fewer having records that have survived four hundred years.
Conclusion
I hope that this post has given you some ideas about how to overcome the research challenge of having an ancestor with a super common name. Most of us can relate to this at some point during our genealogy journey.
If you have any questions about something that you read in this post, or if you would like to share the common name of an ancestor that has been puzzling you, please join in the discussion below.
Thanks for reading today!