Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It’s Saturday Night again – 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Sometimes we don’t know the full name of the parents of an ancestor.  In our family tree, those ancestors with no-known-name parents are the end-of-the-line, at least as far as we know. [Some researchers call them “brick walls.”]

2)  Tell us about several of your ancestors that have no known-name parents, 

3)  When was the last time you looked for these not known parents?

When it comes to ancestors with no known parents, I’d have to say my “no-name” lines are definitely the SMITH and JONES families. While I haven’t devoted a lot of research time to these branches, I have explored the two SMITH lines that married into my CRAWFORD family. Unfortunately, that research has yet to reveal the identities of the SMITH fathers — leaving those lines stuck at a familiar genealogical roadblock.

To visualize where these gaps occur, I created a seven-generation chart from my corner of the FamilySearch tree.

The yellow highlighting calls out those ancestors whose names remain completely unknown — my true “end-of-the-line” individuals.

The bright pink highlighting marks ancestors that are already identified in my Ancestry tree but have not yet been added to FamilySearch.

Out of curiosity, I pulled up the same seven-generation view in WikiTree and Ancestry, and then generated another chart from RootsMagic. Comparing them side by side was an interesting exercise — a visual reminder that even with multiple trees, there are still a few stubborn blank spaces we all live with.

While I could spend some time working in WikiTree to fill in that seventh generation, solving these particular “unknown ancestor” mysteries isn’t at the top of my to-do list right now. For the moment, I’m content knowing where the gaps are — and that someday, when the right record surfaces, one of those yellow boxes just might turn pink.

Even though these “unknowns” remain a mystery for now, they serve as a quiet reminder that genealogy is never really finished. Each blank space on the chart represents a story waiting to be found — and part of the fun is knowing that the next discovery might be just one record away.