If you haven’t seen Alton Woodman’s video—about discovering the story of his father’s life—take a moment to watch it here.

Alton’s experience researching his father’s life taught him, and teaches us all, some very important lessons about doing our family history research.

First, while Ancestry.com provided the essential information Alton needed to get started on his journey, he learned to explore all his resources—including his family, other online resources, and the school his father attended, enabling him to get a much more complete picture of his father’s life.

“Ancestry.com provided me with a very solid starting point,” said Alton. “The website . . . was constructed in such a way I could constantly go back there and build on anything I found and record it right there. . . . And it provided me alternatives to continue to explore. . . . As the story unfolded Ancestry.com stayed with me and allowed me to either record information or go to new avenues of exploration.”

After finding in the census that his father was living at a “Cottage School” in Pleasantville, New York, Alton took the initiative to contact the school and get additional information.

Among the things they sent him was an admission record, where his father was recorded as a “half orphan” and an “inmate.”

This terminology bothered Alton so he began looking up more information online about the school his father attended, sorting through old family photos, and talking to his older sisters, who had more memories about his father’s life.

Online he learned that the school his father attended was called an “orphan asylum,” but was not necessarily only for orphans. Many families going through difficult times sent their children to the schools, which had started as far back as the 1860s. 

Searching through an old box of photographs he had not looked at in many years, he found numerous photographs of his father at the time he was attending the school—all showing him happy, full of life, and surrounded by friends.

And finally, his sisters informed him that their father had taken them to a reunion at the Cottage School one year when Alton was too young to attend.

Alton began to see that this was a place his father was fond of—that despite the sad circumstances that led to him having to attend the school (i.e., his grandfather’s death and his grandmother’s inability to care for him by herself), he had gone on to have many friends and to take full advantage of the opportunities life had given him.

Transcripts provided by the school showed that his father was a good student and that he particularly enjoyed mathematics and wireless telegraphy. They also revealed that he had a job working for six dollars a week in some type of hosiery or millinery—perhaps what had led him to later go to a Commerce High School and eventually to own and run his own grocery store. 

With billions of records to search, Ancestry.com provided the perfect place for Alton to start his search—and come back to again and again. But he also learned that it was important to consult other resources as well.

The second lesson Alton learned was that it sometimes took creativity to find what he was looking for.

After making contact with the Cottage School, Alton went back to Ancestry.com to see where his father ended up after he graduated. He searched for him in the 1930 census, but couldn’t find him.

“I couldn’t find my grandmother; I couldn’t find my aunt; I couldn’t find any of them,” he said. “It didn’t make sense to me because [my father] was the kind of man who would stay close to the community—he wouldn’t move West or anything. He should have been around.”

Alton began thinking something else had happened. He knew that his father’s mother could not read or write, so he wondered if she had miscommunicated something to the census taker.

He started playing with different letters of the alphabet and searching for different variations of the name. When he searched for “Goodman,” instead of “Woodman,” he struck gold.

He found the family, all listed under the erroneous name of Goodman. Even more exciting—his father was there. He had come back to live with the family after leaving the Cottage School. Another piece of the puzzle had come together thanks to creative thinking and Ancestry.com.

In the end, Alton learned that discovering who you are requires some perseverance and creativity, but that’s half the fun.

Research Tip: Get Creative When Searching for Names

Sometimes immigrants changed their name after coming to America. Sometimes individuals did not use a standardized format for spelling their name. Sometimes they went by nicknames or middle names. And sometimes record keepers just plain misspelled them.

All of these can pose challenges to your research, but with a little creativity, you can often find them, just as Alton did. Here are a few tips to help you in your search:

1. Search using abbreviations, variations, foreign translations, phonetic spellings, and even nicknames. Do a search online to see if your ancestors’ last name has a foreign translation—something they used before coming to America.
2. Try initials. In some instances, that was all that was recorded.
3. Reverse the given name and surname. Sometimes record keepers mixed them up.
4. Eliminate a given name or surname and try narrowing the search by using other criteria, such as location and birth/death years.
5. Substitute letters that are commonly mistaken for other letters by transcribers, such as:

     S and L
     T, F, J, and I
     K and R
     P and R
     O and Q
     U and W

 
Was Abraham Lincoln a sawyer or a lawyer? The capital letters “L” and “S” often look alike in nineteenth century manuscripts, so it’s best to search using both variations.
 
 
Are you sure you learned how to spell Mississippi correctly? In the nineteenth century, the double "s" was often penned as something that looks like a lowercase “p” to us.

6. Conduct a wildcard search using an asterisk “*” or a question mark “?” The asterisk represents zero to six characters and the question mark represents one character. For example, a search for “Fran*” would return “Fran,” “Franny,” “Frank,” “Franky,” etc. A search for “Johns?n” would return “Johnsen,” “Johnson,” Johnsan,” etc. You must include the first three letters of a name before any wildcard character.
7. Search for other members of the family (or even neighbors if you can learn out who they were from other census records).
8. Search only for a location and scan through the records for a town or county page by page. This can be time-consuming but worth it.