Finding a Way Through: Overcoming Brick Walls in Your Family Tree Part 2

Photo Courtesy of @anniespratt

In Part 1 of "Finding a Way Through" I provided a list of tips to break through Brick Walls in your Family Tree.

Let me be honest with you: I am a professional genealogist, and yet, with all of the tools at my fingertips, I still have difficult spots in my own family tree!

This month, I am going to spend some time Finding a Way Through the Brick Wall in my Griffin family line. I'm going to show you how I use my own advice and then reveal the outcome in Part 3 of this series.

Finding Family in Northern Alabama

When I became interested in genealogy, my mom was ready with generations of stories and photos from her side of the family. We were very quickly able to confirm eight generations of family history with solid documents and DNA evidence!

My dad’s side of the family was much more challenging. There had been some hard feelings in the past and there were relationships and events that people were still hesitant to talk about, even after several decades. As I pieced together the story of my grandparents and my great grandparents, it felt like I was putting my family back together and perhaps
healing some of the rifts that had split the family apart.

When it was time to take a step back in time to my great-great grandparents, I immediately hit some snags. Distant cousins, who I connected with through DNA testing, filled me in on a few branches of the family tree; but some of the family lines ended abruptly in brick walls.

Through patient use of online databases, connections made through DNA testing, and
a trip to northern Alabama to research in the repositories there, I was able to piece together the stories of all of my great-great-grandparents, except two-- John and Margaret Griffin.

John and Margaret raised four children in Alabama during the early 1900s. All of these children grew up to be successful and the family was very proud of their achievements through the Great Depression and into the mid 20th century. However, no one was able to tell me about John and Margaret before they had children.

The Social Security Baby Names Databases says that among babies born in the 1880s, John is the most popular name for boys, and Margaret is the fifth most popular name for girls. Additionally, Griffin is a common surname in northern Alabama. There were so many John and Margaret Griffins in the region during that time, that I actually found three separate couples by those names, who were all married within ten years of each other! It was challenging to figure out which were my own family members.

I came back to this several times, but I needed more information about MY John and Margaret to make sense of the records I was finding.

Margaret was more difficult because her maiden name was still a mystery to me. Her son’s death certificate lists his mother’s maiden name as “Roden.” However, when I visited a genealogy library in northern Alabama to get some help on my brick wall, I was told by two more local genealogists who examined the evidence that this was probably not her maiden name, it was probably her name from a first marriage.

I took my own advice to Start Fresh. I pulled out a sheet of notebook paper and headed it “Margaret Roden(?) Griffin.” I thought perhaps a record of her death might mention her parents or where she was born, so I wrote down the question, "When and Where did Margaret Griffin die?" I set to work looking for a death certificate or obituary for my great-great-grandmother.