Clues in Family-History Books: Caveat Emptor!

Searching for surnames in books on FamilySearch.org

Let me say it yet again: I married my husband for his ancestors! Happily for me, there are many people researching his ancestral surnames.

Even more important, a number of these people have written books about their research into the history of specific families. As valuable as the books are, loaded with useful clues, I have to say caveat emptor.

Inheriting a Larimer Family History

My husband's family has had a copy of a particular LARIMER book in their hands for more than 60 years. They knew the cousin who researched and wrote it. The author wrote eloquently about the Larimer patriarch who was shipwrecked en route from Northern Ireland to America; he listed every descendant he could find or find a name for, and a tid-bit about each person's life.

This author personally contacted my husband's parents in the 1950s to request information about their family. First-hand knowledge!

Yet I know this book has some typos and mistakes. On our family's copy, my late father-in-law or mother-in-law crossed out names and dates that weren't correct and wrote corrections in pen or pencil. The book listed the wrong death date for my husband's grandmother, for instance. In all, I found a dozen handwritten corrections. And those are only the errors my in-laws were aware of.

Nonetheless, these days, when a cousin contacts me about Larimer ancestors, I send this link to the book on the FamilySearch.org website. Anyone can download and read the book for free, from anywhere. Just don't make the mistake of believing everything. Check. It. Yourself. 

In other words, caveat emptor. Keep the Genealogical Proof Standard in mind while reading, and treat the contents as clues.

Searching for a Surname Book

To see whether Family Search has a book about a particular surname, navigate to the page where you can search only the book collection. See the screenshot above for an example where I searched for "McKibbin" and "Indiana" to find anything about a family that intermarried with the Larimer family in that state. (Sometimes creative spelling will turn up additional books to consider.)

At the top of the results is a book tracing the ancestry of a McKibbin family in Indiana and those who intermarried with it. I've downloaded this free book, which was written in 1977 and subsequently submitted to the Family History Library. Now I'm in the process of checking the information against what I've discovered in other records and from other sources.

There are also other books with the McKibbin surname, the Larimer surname, and names that appear in my husband's family tree a few generations back (such as Work, another family that intermarried with Larimer descendants).

Slowly, I'm making my way through the results lists to see which books are relevant to my research. Along the way, I'm gaining an appreciation for the social, historical, and economic context these family-history books add to my knowledge of hubby's family tree.

Colleen Brown Pasquale ("Leaves & Branches" blog) also suggests searching for family histories in Gengophers.com, which links to results at Family History Libraries, FamilySearch, and other sites.

Caveat Emptor: Clues, Not Facts

Until I can verify, the information in any family-history book is a clue, not a fact. But there are some great clues to be found, as long as I keep caveat emptor in mind.