Records with mixed messages

 

                                      I still haven't added my tree for the descendants of Samuel Tripp but I'm getting close

Time for genealogy research has been limited lately so I've been doing it in fits and starts. I'm still tracking down my Tripp links, the offspring of Samuel Tripp and their descendants. There have been a few mixed messages as I troll through the records. By searching through public family trees on Ancestry I was able to find an obit attached to a tree that included Edward Herbert Tripp, a prime candidate to be one of Samuel's sons. According to that 1958 report, Edward Tripp lived in the Kingsville district of Ontario for most of his life. A fact that would tend to negate the 1916 census record that I found for Edward and his family in Lethbridge, Alberta. Was the census record wrong as it stated that Edward Tripp was Chinese? On the other hand, the names of his wife and children were the same as I'd seen elsewhere.

Interestingly, the information in the obituary also mentioned his time serving with the First Hussars in the Boer War. I've had ancestors who served in various armed conflicts but never one in the Boer War before. I'll have to see if I can find any military records for him. Maybe those records will name his parents. The search goes on as I create a timeline of the various records I've found for the Tripp family. They are all tucked into my Ancestry shoebox for now and it's getting very full. 

Overwhelming hints

 

                   Still working on expanding the family tree of Samuel Tripp and his descendants but nothing new to add yet

Most of my research on my personal family tree has been in England or Scotland. I'm quite familiar with digging for information in the records that are kept there and I've become used to tracking things down. My latest endeavour involves American/Canadian research and I'm finding the amount of Ancestry hints and the records that come up a bit overwhelming. I can see the temptation to accept hints and records because the only options are to accept the record into your own Ancestry family tree or to ignore the hint. There is no option to place it in abeyance to think about it for a while. It would be easy to fill in your tree quickly that way but would it be right?

I think I'll be better off searching for records myself using the hints to steer me in the right direction. Finding out what happened to the children of my 2 x great grandfather, Samuel Tripp, and his wives is helped by the fact that so many of them were sons so kept their last name. So far the deepest mysteries are about the daughters: my Charlotte, the daughter of his first wife, Sarah Ann, whose mother has not been determined and Mary Elizabeth, the daughter of his second wife. It will be interesting to see how far I get with my search for all of Samuel Tripp's descendants. 

Census problems in research

 

                                                        My Tripp family tree hasn't expanded any since last week

I'm still on the trail of Samuel Tripp and his family although my research time has been a bit lacking lately. That's not the only thing that's holding me back from filling in the subsequent years for this family that I last found on the 1881 Ontario census. The last information I found was that of the last child in the family, James Wilbert Tripp who was born in Buffalo, New York later in 1881. With the amount that the family moved around, I thought they might have returned to Canada by the time of the 1891 census was taken. No such luck.

The logical conclusion is that they stayed in the US. But that presents a problems as very little of the 1890 US census survived. It looks like following up on this family will be trickier than I thought.

I've run into problems searching for family links in places where census information is sparse before as members of my family have ended up in different parts of the globe, usually those areas are English speaking but diverse for all that. When I followed up on Australian family links, I was dismayed to find that there were no census records to search. There were electoral records but nothing that showed a family with its members all together. Then there's Ireland. There are some Irish censuses available but I haven't been able to find one early enough to link my family in the East End of London with their Irish roots.

I'm hoping for more research time in the coming weeks so that I can find out what happened to the various members of my Tripp family. If I bring Samuel Tripp's descendants forward in time that should go a long way to figuring out some of my DNA matches. That's more incentive to continue my search.

Adding descendants and more mysteries

 

                                                  Samuel Tripp's children (without Sarah Ann, the mystery girl)

As I wrote about last week, I've started adding the descendants of my 2 x great grandfather, Samuel Tripp, to my family tree. Well, I've added his children, at least the ones for which I found birth records. It appears that he had six children with his second wife, Mary or Mary Ann Redin or Rowding. Samuel and Mary Ann started having children in 1870 and then every two years or so they had another one. The birth records are a road map of the different places that they lived in around Ontario until the last child, James Wilbert Tripp, who was born in Buffalo, New York in 1881.

The move to New York State must have been just before James Wilbert's birth as the family appeared in the 1881 census in Pickering, Ontario. The 1881 Canadian census was taken on April 4, 1881 and James Wilbert made his appearance on October 23 of that same year. Interestingly, there was another child who showed up on the 1881 census, Sarah Ann Tripp, aged 13.

In past searches while looking for evidence of what happened to Catherine Matheson/Tripp, Samuel's first wife, I've found traces of Sarah Ann. In some cases Catherine has been given as her mother. I'm not sure if she was the child of Catherine or Mary Ann and have not been able to find a birth record for her. In the 1881 census her age was given as 13, so a birthdate of 1868 maybe or, as the census was taken in April, perhaps the date of birth could be 1867. Samuel Tripp and Mary Ann tied the knot on September 5, 1867. It remains to be seen if I can pinpoint who Sarah Ann's mother was as I continue to research this family.

Stymied by a mystery

                                              A book about Bobcaygeon I consulted as part of my research

Mysteries intrigue me, especially those mysteries that I find in my family tree. Like the one that involves my 2 x great grandmother, Catherine Matheson. Confirmation of the link between my great grandmother, Charlotte Tripp and her mother Catherine Matheson comes from Charlotte's Ontario marriage record. In the same record Charlotte named her father as Samuel Tripp. The bride also gave her place of birth as Bobcaygeon, Ontario. Records of Charlotte's birth and the marriage of her parents have proved elusive, if they exist at all. The only marriage that I have been able to find for Samuel Tripp is that of his marriage to Mary Roden (sp) on September 5, 1867, in Ontario. As other records led me to believe that Catherine, Samuel's first wife was deceased by the time of his second marriage, I have been searching for any records in Bobcaygeon to confirm Catherine's death or Charlotte's birth. I've had no success so far. 

The problem with this mystery, aside from the fact that I can't find the records to solve it, is that it has kept me from researching my 2 x great grandfather, Samuel Tripp and his family. Rather than going back over the same fruitless search again, maybe my best strategy at this point would be to gather the information that is there and available on this branch of the Tripp tree. Who knows, I might find some clues that help solve the mystery of my 2 x great grandmother, Catherine. 

The lure of RootsTech

 

                                                              The Salt Palace where RootsTech was held in 2025

It was around this time last year that I was thinking about going to Salt Lake City. I've been to the genealogist's Mecca many times in the past with different groups. They were wonderful trips all of them, whether roughing it with the BCGS group at the low cost Carlton Hotel (sadly it closed, then burnt down), or staying at the Plaza Hotel next to the Family History Library, now FamilySearch Library, with other groups like the Ancestor Seekers, I've enjoyed my time there. (Apparently, the Plaza will also be closed soon).

Visiting Salt Lake was especially productive in the time before online databases. We'd spend hours at those microfilm viewers often from the time the library opened until it closed. But genealogy research has come a long way since those days. Technology has transformed the way we search and genealogists are often early adopters of new tech that could help them make connections with their pasts.

It was because of this eagerness to embrace new ways of doing research that the first RootsTech conference was launched in 2011. I had never made it to the conference in the past although I was happy to watch the online content once that was made available in the later years of the conference. But last year, a friend asked me if I wanted to attend in person. I said yes.

RootsTech was a wonderful experience and I'd be interested in going again especially as I now know what to expect. Also, the research we were able to do before the hordes came in was great. But in 2026 I'll be back watching online even though I still have lots of short sessions to catch up with on my playlists from previous years. Have you registered for RootsTech for 2026 yet?

Looking at family history from a different perspective

 

What's your favourite way of  looking at your online family tree? For me, it's the vertical view on my Ancestry tree. There I can see how far back I've added my direct lines. It also reminds me that one of my tasks is to concentrate on adding collateral lines. That's not going very well.

Today when I logged onto my Ancestry account, I check out one of the hints which showed me the hinted tree information in a vertical manner which I found hard to read. It was disconcerting too, as I couldn't get back to my own family tree right away. But everything went back to the way I liked it after I hit the right buttons.

That was when I took a closer look at the view options and chose "Fan". That gave me a fan view of the tree with me as the centre and the generations back to my 2 x great grandparents showing. What's more, it included the dates for every person including the outer tier with those 2 x greats. That highlighted the missing years in the outer edge of my fan chart. Something else to work on.

Changing my family tree view showed the possibilities a new perspective can bring to the same old data. Maybe there was something to those charts we drew up back in the old days before genealogy went online. I'll try to remember to look at my data in different ways going forward.

* The tagline for Julia Creet's The Genealogical Sublime is: Public History in Historical Perspective