#52Ancestors - Week 42 - Lost

It is interesting that the theme this week is 'Lost' as I sit writing this post as the flood waters rise throughout my community in Victoria.  While my home is on slightly higher ground and should remain safe, the same cannot be said for many friends, colleagues and neighbours, and many people around the state are certainly feeling lost as they try to save homes and businesses as the flood water approaches or begin the sad, slow process of cleaning up and assessing what they have lost.

Which brings me to focus on 'lost' ancestors.  Virtually every family tree has them - the family members who for whatever reason just vanish.  They disappear from census records, can't be found in church and cemetery records, somehow manage to leave no traces at all - there suddenly seems to be no paper trail to follow them anywhere. 

A single missing person can leave a large gap in the family narrative, not only because you're missing a potentially tantalizing bit of history but also because there could be a number of documents from the person's later life that you're missing out on because you don't know where to look.  Dealing with these spectral ancestors can be a tricky proposition, especially when you have little information to go on. 

Sometimes people completely changed their names when they disappeared.  Perhaps they emigrated to another county and changed their name to better fit into their new community.  Perhaps they had a past they wanted to leave behind and a change of name allowed them to build a new life.  Perhaps they had a criminal or scandalous past they wanted to leave behind.  Maybe they were evading responsibilities or simply wanted to start again.  For whatever reason, they simply didn't want to be found - and perhaps their family didn't want to find them either.  People disappeared for a number of reasons.  

Their disappearance may not have been deliberate.  Not all records have survived the passage of time and some have been deliberately destroyed because they were not deemed to be worth preserving.  Some records have not been kept to a standard we would expect today.  Some names have been so badly recorded - our ancestors were considerably less focused on things like consistent spelling than we are today - that connecting the dots becomes almost impossible.

Finding elusive, lost ancestors is a task all genealogists face at various points in their research, and the triumph of successfully breaking down the brick wall of an elusive ancestor is something that hopefully we all experience as well.