Question:
Is it ever worth it to collect families by surname? I've been running mine on Ancestry, the popular databases, and there are dozens in many countries. How can I connect them?
Annie
Answer from Ancestry Worship Genealogy
Probably not.
Back in the day, I met one woman, pre-databases, who had spent years documenting thousands of families with her Spanish surname. I thought that was kind of crazy, and it's probably unlikely that she ever got that name, fairly common, back to one patriarch. Plus this is not genealogy...
Genealogy is when you go back generation after generation, as far as you can go, documenting. In the process you might document a great number of family groups whose connections take a long time or never to prove, on the chance that they are related. However, you might document them only because they lived in the same place as a proven ancestor or have some other viable connection. For instance, if you find on Naturalization Papers a different town than the one named on a Steamship arrival to the USA, for the same person, you likely would investigate both places looking for family members.
If your surname is quite uncommon, it might be worth it to see if they are related, since an unusual surname might after all originate with a particular patriarch. HERE IS WHERE DNA COLLECTION SURNAME PROJECTS might be useful. Once you have proven a relationship that way, you might find yourself working with others who are related to put the family story together, with their help in their other countries.
For instance, I know someone who has a Polish surname for which there are no more than 600 people alive in the world, some in the United States, Canada, France, England, as well as Poland, possibly the Ukraine and Slovakia. This is a history of people fleeing Poland as immigrants fairly recently to other countries. Because some of their members were on borders, they have had seizures of persons and properties by Russians as well as Nazi's... This surname appears, though not Jewish, in concentration camp records, also among men killed in the forest who were soldiers, and among men taken to Siberia. The family was being liquidated.
Christine
