Family History

The New England Historic Genealogical Society’s Dr. Edwin Knights offers “Confronted With Cancer”, a great look into using your family tree to trace cancer in your family.

Is there cancer in you family’s medical pedigree? And if so, how are you going to find it? From death certificates? Obituaries? Perhaps they will help, but death certificates were established as public health documents, not for the enlightenment of genealogists, so don’t get your hopes too high! It may take some real detective work, but it’s certainly worth the try. So let’s get out your family pedigree chart and see how we succeed. Let’s begin with the most recent generations.

We know that cancer is a problem today in all the developed countries around the world. Thanks to the National Health Institute (NIH) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) we can study the statistics, see the trends, and decide where to focus our efforts. If you know of any cancers in the youngest generation, enter them now. If there was a cancer death, be sure to record the date, of course, but also keep a record of any “incidental” cancer cases — those which might have contributed to death or just be an incidental finding. As one out of every four deaths in the United States is from cancer, the odds are pretty strong that it won’t be long before you’ve noted some cases. If you do, be sure to note the estimated date of ONSET, or at least when it was first suspected or diagnosed.

Part of my recent research into our family tree involved tracking why people died, but while it occured to me, the process of tracking down illnesses that didn’t kill people immediately, like some cancers, would be harder information to find.

As is typical with such illnesses, Dr. Knights recommends getting information from living relatives. But this only gets you as far as the last two to four generations. No one is alive who remembers what happened to great-great-great grandmother.

Death certificates only list the cause of death, and sometimes they just didn’t know. It would list heart failure, but maybe it was a cancer or disease that caused the heart to give out.

Dr. Knights gives examples of the most common forms of cancer historically in the United States, but who knows what was really going on in the early 1800s to our ancestors.

A surprising statistic he offered was about children:

It may surprise you to learn that in children, cancer is the second leading cause of death between ages 1-14 in the U.S., with accidents causing the most fatalities. The diseases affecting children are much different than those in adults; lymphocytic and other leukemias are the most common, followed by tumors of the nervous system, lymphomas, soft-tissue lesions and tumors of the kidneys.

If this statistic is true, maybe the death of so many young in our past wasn’t just related to accidents and disease.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

So gather what medical information you can today to create a record for your descendants.

Tips from the Pros: Date Estimates-More Than a Good Guess from Ancestry.com offers some great information on how to estimate your ancestors’ dates.

Most online database websites provide a field for selecting the date range of a search, or the age range of an individual in a particular record. An age range is, in fact, a date range because you are estimating the period of years in which a birth took place. Regardless of the nature of the date estimate or the breadth of years you choose to search, careful analysis should go into the choice.

When searching for an individual take into account what date information you have and where it came from. Can it be considered accurate? What did a record state? Some individuals regularly lied about age, not necessarily with any consistency as to the error. Some records did not require an accurate age, perhaps just an indication the individual was over the age of twenty-one.

A successful search could also depend upon the date when the record was made. This is true of wills. The date of probate is more significant and may have been years after the date of death.

Many family history and genealogy programs will help you estimate the age and various events in the list of your ancestor, but a lot of the estimating comes from guessing. The more informed your guess, the closer to the truth you might be.

When you record a “guess” or “estimate” in the research information of your ancestor, make sure you label it as such. The next generation of family history researchers might think your guess is a fact and be led astray by the mistake. Be clear on what is a known and verified fact and what is a guess or estimate in your research records.

In “What’s in an Address?” by Juliana Smith on 24/7 Family History Circle, Smith reminds us that addresses play a very important role in discovering magical links to our past.

The conversation was a reminder of how important it is to document our trail through addresses. If for some reason my personal history didn’t survive the years, for a future family historian researching my life, knowledge of my relatively brief stay in that house would be helpful in locating several important vital records, and in separating my Smith family from the countless other Smiths in the area. Because I didn’t live there during a census year, that knowledge would have to come from other sources.

Knowing your ancestor’s address can be an important key to locating other records. Let’s take a closer look at where to find addresses and how they can be used.

The article continues with great tips and resources for putting together a “chronology of addresses” for your ancestor’s lives, helping to fill in the blanks on your family’s history.