Pitfalls for the unwary (me)

[morgano]

Hello.
Just a story of how I managed to get myself thoroughly confused, while trying to tie up some genealogical loose ends...
I'd just found out that an English ancestor of mine had the maiden name Proudfoot - not one I'd heard of before. I was looking up some Perthshire McLarens, a group of several siblings, and found what I thought was the death certificate of one of their number, James McLaren, since the age, location and father seemed to be a pretty good match. What surprised me was that he appeared to have a different mother from his older brother and that her maiden name was Proudfoot.
I was developing all sorts of theories about the widowed father's second marriage etc., when I stumbled across the OPR birth record of Margaret McLaren, the youngest sibling, who turned out to have the same mother as the older brother, a McLauchlan, not a Proudfoot at all.
At this point, I decided to do a thorough excavation of the McLaren situation in Dowally. I knew that my bunch included Peter (born around 1775, according to the 1851 census), John, born 1779, James and Margaret, born 1792, so I searched the OPRs for all McLaren births in Dowally from 1/1/1773 to 31/12/1794.
It turns out there are thirty listed, including 4 Jameses, 5 Janets, 5 Johns, 5 Margarets and 3 Thomases. I don't see any instances where a couple has baptized a second baby with the name of a dead sibling. Most remarkably, out of my bunch of McLarens (now 5, with the discovery of a Janet), Peter and John are not listed, nor anyone else born between 1773 and 1787.
My Margaret McLaren married a James McLaren and had a daughter, called Margaret, of course.




Morgano

[heymarky]

Don't know if it will make you feel better, but...

I found a Mrs. Dyer age 60 living with John Dyer age 3 in the 1841 census. Since I was missing a John of that age with his parents in that census, I assumed that this Mrs. Dyer must be my gggg-grandmother (Marion Logan) and her grandson.

Living at the same address, but a different household (there is a double line between them) is a Margaret Weir aged 60 and a James Kirkwood, age 1. "Hmmm", thought I, "I wonder if they were more than just neighbors."

While trying to solve that mystery, I found a Margaret Dyer's marriage to a Thomas Weir. How exciting! Some Dyers from a completely different area! Maybe this will solve some mysteries!

Eventually I found a Maraget Weir Dyer's birth. Must be a neice, I thought so I started trying to tie her in.

Trying to keep this reasonably short, after spending a great deal of time (and credits) trying to connect Margaret Dyer and the others to my tree, eventually I noticed Margaret and Thomas Weir elsewhere in the 1841 census.

I still kept all of my research on "those" Dyers just in case.

It was quite a disappointment, in a way, because the Dyers around Margaret Weir seemed to have done well for themselves and it looked like I was going to be able to find out quite a bit about them. I found several testaments, and newspaper articles regarding them.

Oh well. They turned out not to be mine, but it was fun.

- Mark Dyer

[sheilajim]

Hi Mark & Morgano,

Things like this happen all the time with me. Sometimes you have to research a family to disprove a connection as well as prove one. Many times, at least for me, there is no conclusive proof one way or the other.