How to Deal With "Unclaimed" Relatives in Our Trees

The view in early spring driving between Raton, NM and Cimarron, NM

How do we deal with "unclaimed" relatives in our "trees". The proverbial red headed stepchild? I do not mean how do we deal with them in real life, I mean how do we deal with this information in our charts, our genealogical family trees?

For us it all depends on the source, sometimes information on unclaimed individuals was common knowledge, sometimes the information was just there and we bumped into it by accident, sometimes someone let's us in on the "secret".

We always look at the source of the information before adding or subtracting the individual from our database. It also causes us to go looking for the evidence and if it is there we add the individual if not I may keep the information and wait to see if some additional information will show up.

We have been at this, genealogy, for a long, long, time. We work as a team, we rarely work at this alone. Both of us combing this book or that book or deciding where the information we need my be had. I input the names into the database and Donna keeps me honest. The database we maintain now contains over 26,000 names, somehow all connected to my sons. That is a lot of data and folks would be surprised at what information we bump into.

Both Donna and I work at compiling the information, sometimes alone but most likely together. We spend some time most days on the subject, sometimes a little time other times several hours and sometimes the whole day. It all depends what it is we are after. We have traveled to west Texas to Southern Colorado and points in Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska in search of information. Some places in Minnesota and Wisconsin have also been visited, as some of her family comes from that area. We actually moved and lived in both Minnesota and Wisconsin, retracing some ancestral footsteps of her people

Anyway, one piece of information on an unclaimed relative just came into our possession via a comment on one of the posts here on this weblog. That has begun a new quest for information on someone who we knew about but did not know that she had been married and had children. In other words we knew about her and some of her ancestors but knew/know zero about her descendants. But someone knows something about the matter, somewhere the information is waiting to be found. We will see what comes up for Maria Abrana Lucero AKA Maria Abrana Ebel.