Yesterday I provided research help at the annual Exploring Your Swedish Roots day at the Swedish American Museum in Chicago. It means changing to a new research topic every half hour. Often a problem gets solved but sometimes, a mystery lingers. It can, perhaps, be visualized as genealogical speed dating.
One mystery was the man who was recorded leaving Sweden at the right time. He had the right name and the right date of birth. Yet he was still being recorded in Sweden a couple years later. I found him returning to his parents’ household from Denmark not long after leaving for America. Progress yes, but the mystery lingers.
Someone else had just learned her great-grandmother’s maiden name. It is a very Swedish name but rather unusual. It could have been the kind of name that leads to progress with minimal starting information but it turned out otherwise. She appeared twice in the U.S. census after marrying. We could not find her before that despite an unusual name an approximate age and even knowing places she might have lived. No records of emigrants from Sweden or immigrants to America matched her. In the census she claimed to be from the place she first lived when she came to America and the few records of her showed that she was aging at 6 or 7 years per decade. We were left wondering what was fact and what was fiction.
Other times, I was rewarded with exclamations like, “Oh my, that’s Aunt Viola, Uncle Karl and Aunt Greta and there’s my grandfather over there! Wait is that his birth date?!?” or “Wow, I didn’t know anything about these people who never left Sweden! This is great.” Sometimes I could even explain that, from the wording and the structure of the record, it was likely that the widow listed at the bottom of the page was great-grandma or that the cluster of people listed at the top of the page were an ancestor’s siblings. Many a speed date found those kinds of matches.
Maybe you can try to speed date some people from your past. You might be able to take a name you’ve never researched and find some matching records and either decide that they might be interesting to get to know or decide that they really aren’t for you. Just remember, when your speed date is over, you’ll need contact information. Save those documents and the citation info. You’ll want to have those if the date was a success.
Speed dating may not be the ideal form for carrying on a long-term relationship but it isn’t meant to be. It is meant as a start. My day of genealogical speed dating isn’t the way that the people with whom I worked should continue their genealogy. They will need to slow down and take notes, record thoughts, cite sources, make entries into databases and file their documents. A successful speed date, genealogical or otherwise, is only the start.