Facts Don't Always Fit

I've was recently researching a relative (by marriage) who passed away in just the last few years. He had a rather uncommon surname. Since he still has living children, for the sake of anonymity, I'm going to call him Jon Luke Long (not an uncommon name I know, but you get the idea). A quick Google search showed me in 2010, there were only an estimated 2,307 people with his actual surname in the entire United States...less than one in 100,000 people. One would think this would make working on hints easier....how likely would it be to have 2 people with the same name n the same area? Sure, there could be a father and son living in close proximity, but birth dates should help identify the proper person to attach hints to right? 

It's not a problem of having enough hints either. I had several, from various collections. The problem was them fitting into the narrative of known facts. My Jon Long was from northeastern Ohio. Initially, I found several hints appearing to be for a Jon Thomas Long (when I compared them with other records for the person). Clearly, with a middle name so distinctly different, I could easily ignore these hints as being the wrong name. 

But then there were the school yearbook hints. Sometimes, those are the only way to find a picture of someone in my tree, especially for more recent relatives. But they can also be hard to verify as being the right person. I know many people skip these records entirely, but I choose to use them where I can. I ignore those I'm confident are wrong, and I "maybe" any I'm not sure of. I had 7 different yearbook hints, from 2 different schools. And to make it harder, the schools were located several hours apart, and neither was in an already known location for this person. It's not unusual to have someone live in a different city than they attended school. As I've shared in the past, this applied to me personally 

With only a name of Jon Long shown in the yearbook hints, I had to figure out if they were my Jon Long, or not. In this case, the person in question had a more recent obituary. Thankfully, the family included some important genealogical information, including the high school he graduated from. Should make the search easier right? Not in this case. None of the hints were from the school listed in the obituary, and none were for a person who was graduating. The school mentioned in the obit was located in northeastern Ohio (fitting with other known facts). The hints I had were from central and western Ohio. But people move, and just because they didn't fit my currently known facts, didn't necessarily make them wrong. The challenge is not having much information on where this person lived during his earlier years. I know where he was born, died, and in this case graduated high school. But I don't have information for locations between birth and high school.

The photos of the persons from the 2 schools were also very different. It was clear, if (and it was a big if) either of the locations was correct, it was going to be one school or the other. In a few hints the name was simply shown as J Long. Jon? James? Jerry? Initials weren't going to help me. I started by looking at the locations for Jon Thomas Long, the person I knew was not my Jon Luke Long. I started checking the distances between cities this person lived in. Finally, I was able to identify one of the schools was only 40 minutes away from a known location for the "wrong" Jon. While not proof positive, it was enough for me to mark those yearbook hints as not likely being my Jon Long. The school in the remaining hint was more of a challenge, but ultimately, based on the photo of Jon in his obituary and comparison to the photo in the yearbook, I determined it was also unlikely to be my Jon Long. While I never found any yearbook photos from the known school listed in the obituary, I'm glad I could fairly reliably rule out the incorrect hints. 

Not every hint fits known facts and narratives. Sometimes, we can fairly easily rule hints out. Other times, we can't. But my personal feeling is it's better to leave something as an undecided "maybe" than trying to force it to fit. Eventually, another hint may come along to prove or disprove a previously undecided hint. And when I've nothing at all to compare a hint to? I do my best to skim all the available hints looking for any patterns. If I just don't have anything tangible, I'll usually skip working on the hint entirely until I find some new information. Just like a jigsaw puzzle, putting the wrong piece in a place it doesn't belong can make it harder to figure out the puzzle.

Image free for use under the Pixabay Content License. https://pixabay.com/photos/puzzle-last-particle-piece-654956/