Stuck on a Genealogy Brick Wall?

Nine techniques that break most genealogy brick walls — and how to tell when a wall is genuinely a records problem rather than a research problem.

A brick wall is the point where everything you know how to do has stopped working — usually an ancestor whose parents you cannot identify. Most walls are not actually walls. They're a record you haven't thought to look for, or a name you're spelling the way it's spelled now.

Nine things to try before giving up

1. Abandon the spelling. Your ancestor could not necessarily spell their own name, and the clerk wrote what he heard. Search by sound, by first name plus place plus year, or with wildcards. Indexers also misread handwriting — a name can be sitting there under a spelling no human would guess.
2. Research the neighbours. The single most productive technique in the field: study the friends, associates, and neighbours who appear alongside your family. People migrated in groups, married the family down the road, and witnessed each other's documents. The record naming your ancestor's parents is often filed under someone else's name.
3. Work the siblings. If your direct ancestor's records are thin, their brothers and sisters had death certificates too — and any one of those names the same parents.
4. Go to probate and land. Wills and estate files name heirs, and heirs are relationships. Land records show property moving between family members. These are the most under-used records in genealogy and they predate vital registration.
5. Check for a burned courthouse. Some counties lost their records to fire or flood. If that's your county, you're not failing — you need substitute records: tax lists, church registers, newspapers, land, and state census.
6. Read the newspaper, not just the obituary. Small-town papers reported visits, illnesses, and who came from out of state for the funeral. That last one names relatives no official record connects.
7. Question the assumption. Walls are frequently built on an inherited error — a wrong birth year, a confusion between two men with the same name in the same county, or a family story that placed the arrival in the wrong decade. Go back and re-verify the last fact you're sure of.
8. Try the church. Where civil registration hadn't started or didn't survive, parish and congregational registers often did — baptisms, marriages, and burials, sometimes decades earlier than the state.
9. Write down what you've actually searched. A research log converts “I've looked everywhere” into a list with visible gaps. The gap is usually obvious once it's on paper.

When it really is the records

Some walls are genuine. Before roughly 1850 the US census named only the head of household, so a woman's maiden name or a child's parentage may simply never have been written down. Immigrant origins frequently stop at “Ireland” or “Germany” because no American record ever asked for the town. When that's the situation, the honest answer is that the evidence doesn't exist — not that you haven't looked hard enough.

Bringing in a second pair of eyes

Outside help works on brick walls mostly because a different researcher knows different record sets — and isn't carrying your assumptions. We take single-wall engagements as focused work quoted separately from any full project: brick-wall research starts at $250, and we'll tell you before taking it on if we think the records genuinely aren't there.

Frequently asked questions