Breaking the Brick Wall
Sample chart with fake names
You eventually reach a point where the records run out and you reach the “brick wall”. I’m lucky to have some lines that I can trace back to the early 1600s but unless your family is royalty or had an important job you can only go back so far.
The earliest parish records go back to 1553 in some places but most start around 1600. I started playing with Excel to track families in a specific place to see if I could glean more information about individuals who might be connected. Depending on the parish there might be really good birth and marriage records but spelling of names was really varied so it’s easy to miss people. Sometimes births were not registered or people may have moved to another town.
These are the steps I take to create a spreadsheet (the one shown above is just a sample with fake names):
I create a new file titled with the surname I am researching e.g. Thorntoun. My earliest confirmed relative is Alexander Thorntoun of Inveresk who married Janet Hunter and had six children beginning in 1617. I don’t know his birth or when he got married so he is a “brick wall” - I can’t go back any further. I know he must have been born between 1650 and 1700 but the parish records in Inveresk only go back to 1607. Was he born there? or did he move there from somewhere else?
In ScotlandsPeople I do a global search for births anywhere in Scotland using the family surname. I use wildcards to cover any possible spelling e.g. Thorntoun can be Thornton, Thorntown, or Thornitoon. So I enter Th * nt * n in my search. This will bring up all the available birth records of Thorntouns from 1553.
From this I can see where the earliest Thorntouns lived and how many of them there were. It isn’t a common name so that helps a lot.
In Excel I create a spreadsheet using the format shown in this sample image. Couples are listed at the top of columns with their children below. Rows start with the year of birth. I start by entering the family I know, using my Ancestry tree for this information. Then I go carefully through the SP data looking for earlier Thortouns in Inveresk and creating columns to the left, going back in time. The place of the children’s birth is listed at the top and sometimes siblings will be born in different places so I note that.
As I add earlier families I might be able to see naming patterns emerge or movements from one town to another. I use Google maps to see where the parishes are in relation to each other.