Progress Report: Delving into Genealogy

My initial foray into genealogical research has proven to be both productive and frustrating, just as I suspected it might be. So where does one begin? A bewildering array of tools are available to the family historian, the website ancestry.com being the most popular and the most useful. As is the case with other mega-websites (Google and eBay come to mind), ancestry.com has grown to a level of undisputed dominance in their field, and is universally considered to be the genealogy resource. A subscription is required for its use, so my natural instinct (cheapness) kicked in, prompting me to investigate other options. But after surfing the free sites for a couple of days my decision was easy. I signed up, made a pot of coffee and got to it.
Once I signed up with ancestry.com, I started by creating a family tree from the information I already had. Building a family tree on ancestry.com is easy and rewarding, with “hints” popping up next to family members as you enter them. Following those hints, and doing your own searches through the extensive database of records, is the fun part. But this isn’t shooting fish in a barrel, as you have to view whatever you find with a skeptical eye. How many Homer Stevens’ do you suppose resided in the state of Ohio in the late 1800s? Lots, and figuring out which one you’re related is often far from obvious. It’s easy to latch onto a snippet of data, thinking that you’ve found that next generation into your past, only to discover down the road that something just doesn’t mesh. Genealogy is a learning experience, every step of the way.
Having started with considerable data for my mother’s side, I eagerly sought more. While I wasn’t able to go “all the way back to Ugg and Gugg” (my sister Carol’s humorous reference to cave-dwelling ancestors), I did find references, however shaky, to the 13th Century and Sir Anthony de Tipton, born in 1260 in Shaffordshire, England. Did the descendants of Sir Anthony, who some believe slayed the Prince of Wales in 1282, settle in a peaceful agricultural community in Tennessee? I’ll have get back with you on that.
If I was able to cruise through my mother’s family with comparative ease, dad’s family made up for it, yielding few secrets. Even though I know the important details regarding my paternal grandparents (names, times and place of birth/death), all I’ve determined is that my great grandfather was Albert Stevens, and even that was found only with help. You see, I have in my possession a “cheat sheet”, a gaggle of data compiled by Carol many years ago for a school assignment. The form-like pages were filled out by our parents and grandparents, and this has proved to be a valuable framework on which to build. Unfortunately Dad’s tree suffers from being incomplete and, in minor ways, inaccurate. My father was a true perfectionist, and I suspect that the errors didn’t originate with him. One example is the birthplace of his father and grandfather, Byseville, Ohio. Things smoothed out once I determined that the town was in fact, Byesville. No dates of birth/death were given for my great grandfather Albert, or for my great grandmother Mary. Her maiden name is given as Hockenberry, but that has led nowhere. I quickly discovered that maiden names are one of the most significant stumbling blocks to family research. So too are inaccuracies in old documents and records, particularly the census. The census was typically hurriedly written with little regard for legibility or accuracy, which is why it’s best to find more than one source for any given fact.
So that’s it for now. The Stevens clan can only be traced back to my great grandfather Albert, and given that the only facts I possess are his 1852 birth year and residency in Ohio, I don’t have much to work with. Mom’s family, however, can be traced through the Tipton bloodline nearly back to “Ugg and Gugg”, that is if you put much stock in a single afternoon’s research. For now, I’ll remain skeptical.