Wanted to find the death records for a set of relatives last night. Their last child was born in 1775, so that’s when I started looking. The search was tedious (records were in written in a German scrawl), but I knew that if I found them quickly after my search started it meant that the parents died young leaving the children behind. So while I was excited about the potential to find them, I really did not want to find them right after I started as I knew what finding their death records so closely to their children’s birth meant.
They died in 1807 and 1810. Took two hours of searching but I found them. Then I thought about all the things that likely went on in their lives between the birth of their last child and the death of the father in 1807. Just gave me a different perspective on the searching. I scrolled through thirty years of records in a fraction of the time it took to create them.
I was tempted originally to start searching about twenty-five years after the birth of the last child. But I knew that doing that meant that I could easily end up having to backtrack and search those earlier years anyway. Just starting at the last known point in time they were alive and working forward was the best way to go.
And…I actually started searching for the father around nine months before the child was born.
And…the handwriting in the 1807/1810 records was much easier to read than that in 1775, so there was that. From a perfectly selfish standpoint, they left better records because they didn’t die young.
The search isn’t always about us.
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