How can they be so helpful? Well, have you ever had a couple you're pretty sure was married (perhaps from family knowledge or maybe from names mentioned in an obituary), but you've yet to find a record prove it? Not only do public record hints often show maiden and married names for women, but by having all addresses recorded, you can easily see when two people may have lived at the same address. Is it a smoking gun proving they were married? No, of course it's not! But it's better than nothing. And if you do an exact search for a street address in Ancestry, you may find the name of an unknown spouse (or a spouse for whom you only had a surname). Specifically with regard to the public record databases on Ancestry, I hesitate to say they're significantly helpful for finding children or other family members (other sites are better suited to this). There may be times when they could assist, but the vast majority of where I find they're helpful is for spouses.
They can also be useful when you're running into couples where both parties have similar names to couples in your tree, or someone with the same name but you've already found it's not the person in your tree. By making notes when you ignore a public records hint, you can save considerable effort the next time you run into records about people or addresses you've already researched and disproven.
So, how do I handle all this data? I choose to record the dates and location as a Residence Fact. This allows me a quick visual if other types of records happen to be from the same place. I can expand the dates as necessary when other records surface, without needing to add a bunch of identical residence facts. Then I create an Address fact (also with the dates and location) and put the street address and zip code in the detail. Since I never let Ancestry create any facts, and I enter them all by hand, this allows me to be consistent in how the data is recorded. This method also enables me to use Ctrl+F on the person's profile to quickly check for a street address. There are any number of ways to record the information, this just happens to work well for me.
I've seen many times when there are addresses for a location where there are no other apparent records of the person being there, or with overlapping dates. This could indicate a 2nd residence (vacation home anyone?) or maybe the person was a cosigner for someone (parents helping a child perhaps). Maybe they made a short term move, like going to college out of state or a temporary job relocation. Perhaps they have/had a thriving Airbnb or rental situation going. Just because we can't find supporting records doesn't mean it's not a viable address. It simply means we don't know the nature of the record from where the address was taken to know how it relates to our person, or where we might possibly look for validation. Per Ancestry, the Public Records Indexes contain information culled from:
- Telephone Directories
- Marketing Lists
- Postal Change-of-Address Forms
- Public Record Filings
- Directory Assistance Records
- Property and Land Records
I've also noticed some of the dates in these records may stretch beyond a death date. This could be because there was no change to the property ownership and family continued to live in the home. Or, perhaps the family simply never stopped mail delivery for the deceased, so it continued to show up as a viable address on mailing lists. In this specific case, I use the date of death in my facts. If I were to run into an address only shown after the date of death, I would likely not record it, as it might be the result of a change of address submitted to facilitate the execution of a will. Such an address might help identify who the executor of a will was though! I can't say I recall actually running into this with regard to public record hints, but it could happen.
For me, the time and effort recording this data has value. Indexed pubic data isn't perfect, and it's not a substitute for proper records. But it can help solidify a hypothesis, provide a tangible link, or open up a new potential research avenue.
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Addresses are especially helpful with people of the same name or multiple families in town who might or might not be related. However, the modern databases also conflate people with the same name, linking them to several different states, when in fact, they are just people with the same name. I've found that has happened with my own information.
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