Brick or "Stucko"?

Brick walls. If you haven't encountered one yet in your genealogy journey, you undoubtedly will at some point. It's a given! Sooner or later, the records simply aren't available, or the pieces just won't fall into place. Whether records never existed, have been lost to time, or simply aren't available in a format we can access yet, sooner or later you'll hit the proverbial "brick wall". The term is well known, but is it always accurate?

I have a several brick walls in my research right now. Indeed they seem absolutely impenetrable! The other day, I was diligently trying to chip away at the bricks once again, hoping to find a loose piece to help me demolish the blockage. I started thinking....(Yes, yes, I know....thinking can be dangerous!) Brick... After the Great Fire of London in 1666, buildings had to be rebuilt of brick or stone (to prevent such a devastating fire in the future). The walls of the buildings were being rebuilt to last. Brick is a durable building material. No wonder we call our challenges this, and have such a hard time breaking through them in genealogy! While I'm sure there are exceptions (people do nefarious things from time to time to avoid detection), most of our genealogical brick walls probably weren't created by design. They were simply created by time. And more time may be needed to find the best method to break them down. Some may stand the test of time, impervious to ever being removed.

But are all of our brick walls really brick? I have several..."loose ends". They're not really brick walls. There are a plethora of records, but the problem is names - in general. The further back I go in England (I'm only in the late 1700's and early 1800's) I find walls not made of brick, but of stucco. Or as I like to call it "stucko". Names become repetitive and locations unfamiliar. Even couples may be name twins, making it doubly difficult to figure out. It becomes harder to tell whether locations are accurate. We like to think, as we go back in time, communities were smaller, and people didn't move around as much. And in some cases this is true. But the population in England swelled from the 5 millions to 9 million between 1700-1800. It was s no small village! So even though records exist, and the names I'm looking for can be found, just how do I tell if the record is for the right person in the right place at the right time? These are my "stucko" walls. 

While durable, "stucko"...er...stucco, is more prone to cracking. Once a crack appears, we can likely work our way to removing the hindrance. They are walls with loose ends, threads waiting to be pulled. Tugging on one may unravel the rest. These walls may topple with a bit of work (and a lot of open browser windows). These challenges aren't necessarily built of brick. They may simply need extra patience and a bit of luck to fell them.

Somehow, reframing how I think about walls (in general) helps me find patience. Patience to search the records again. Patience to make the tenuous connections. Patience to do one more full-text search. Sometimes patience pays off and the "stucko" crumbles. Other times, no matter how hard I try, I realize under the stucco covering lies a wall made of brick after all.

Image by Takeshi Hirano from Pixabay