Have I been doing this to my ancestors? With our automatically generated charts, and GEDCOM files, we may find ourselves summing up our ancestors lives as just a name, birth, marriage, and death date. But as many of the records we collect can tell us, their lives were much more. Each of them has a story to tell, but have we been taking time to read the story?

Taking A Closer Look
My mother recently gave me a framed photograph of her great- grandmother, Margaret Dooner Dyer. I began to think about her life and really trying to form a picture using the names, dates, and other odds and ends I had found.

Margaret A. Dooner was born in Ireland and came to America with her family in 1847 on the "Fidelia," during the potato famine. Her age on the passenger list is three years old. The family settled in Brooklyn and stayed there. Her father, John Dooner, is listed as a laborer in the 1850 U.S. Federal Census. He passed away six years later. Her mother and brother later got into the milk business and are listed with "retail milk" or "milk" as their occupation in later directories and censuses.

Margaret A. Dooner married Edwin Brough Dyer, on 10 May 1860 in St. James Cathedral in Brooklyn. The couple lived next door to Margaret's family on Tillary St. for many years. Edwin joined the Brooklyn police force as a patrolman in 1863, and on Tuesday, 21 May 1867, he apprehended a murderer while patrolling his route on Gold and Johnson Street. The heroic capture is related in dramatic fashion in the Brooklyn Eagle the following day.

Between 1881 and 1888, Edwin and Margaret moved to 69 Johnson Street, and in April 1892, Edwin was appointed Captain of the Twelfth Precinct in Brooklyn. Margaret gave birth to eleven children, although three sons, all named Alfred, died before age three.

In January 1892, Margaret and Edwin are listed in the Standard in a long list of guests to the wedding of two other prominent Brooklynites. Among the other distinguished guests are ex-President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland, as well as several congressmen. (Coincidentally, another of the guests on the list was ex-police commissioner John Pyburn. Thirty-one years later, Margaret and Edwin's granddaughter Madelon Dyer, would marry John Pyburn's grandson, Paul F. Pyburn, Jr.)

Edwin Dyer passed away on 27 February 1898 of liver cancer and his death and funeral is described in great detail in the Brooklyn Eagle. Margaret passed away 3 July 1911.

While this is just a brief look (abbreviated for the purpose of this article), it gives us a much clearer picture of their lives than the basic names and dates we would see on a pedigree chart.

Examining Various Record Types
In the summary above, information was pulled from a variety of sources. A passenger list located a Dooner family and the 1850 Census entry with corresponding ages for the children helps to verify that we have the right family. Subsequent census entries and directories help to trace the family's movements and occupations, and the headstone at a family grave, gives John Dooner's (later spelled Doner) death date, as well as those of several of Margaret and Edwin's children.

Newspapers give some great insight into Edwin's career on the force, the lavish wedding they attended, and his death and funeral. The Eagle and Brooklyn, Part 1, published in 1893 by the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper gives a brief overview of his career with dates outlining Edwin's career on the police force. Vital records also help to fill in dates and details, as well as an entry in Bishop Loughlin's Dispensations, Diocese of Brooklyn, 1859-1866.

Putting It All Together
As family historians we are constantly gathering information about our forebears, and even if we are very organized, unless you put it all of the bits together in some type of narrative, you may not be able to see the whole picture. It's like looking at a big jigsaw puzzle before it's put together. If you look at the pieces individually, you may be able to recognize certain features, but the whole picture will not really be clear. As we start fitting the pieces together, the puzzle begins to take shape and it becomes easier to see where all of the other pieces go.

I like to assemble my ancestors chronologically in a timeline (Yes, longtime readers know that I am forever rambling on about the joys of timelines, but I'm telling you it really works for me.) Dipping back into the puzzle metaphor, it is also important to make sure that all the puzzle pieces fit correctly and a timeline can be very helpful in this aspect. If the piece seems to fit, does the picture around it make sense? If you're putting an eye where the tail should be, you probably aren't putting the puzzle together correctly. Similarly, if you have a child being born to a six year old, you may be putting your family puzzle together incorrectly. Or if you have someone appearing somewhere that you know they can't possibly be, you may be trying to fit in a similar looking piece from a completely different puzzle. Too bad we don't have a box top with the completed picture on it to work with in genealogy!

As you are putting together your narrative, it is very important to footnote where each fact was found. Since I also have the sources of information included in the timeline I created for the Dooners and Dyers, it was very easy when I put together the narrative to note where I found the information. My complete narrative, which was too long for this newsletter (and probably would have bored you all to tears), has each fact footnoted. This is a necessary step so that years from now when I look back at it, I won't have to rely on my memory, which has a really nasty habit of failing me when it comes to questions like, "Now, where did I see that?"

One of the best things about putting all of the information together like this, is that as I went along, I kept finding new leads and now have a number of things on my "to-do" list that offer the promise of even more information. I also feel like I know Margaret and Edwin a bit better. Sure, I'll probably never know every thing about them, and I still have a few dates that need to be nailed down, but this sure beats the heck out of :

Margaret A. (Dooner) Dyer
Born: ca. 1841-43
Married: 10 May 1860
Died: 3 July 1910

I'm sorry, but just as with reading Shakespeare on the Book-A-Minute site, you're definitely missing something with the ultra-condensed version.

Bibliography
Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper. The Eagle and Brooklyn, Part 1. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Eagle, 1893

Silinonte, Joseph M. Bishop Loughlin's Dispensations, Diocese of Brooklyn, 1859-1866: Genealogical Information from the Marriage Dispensation Records of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn (Kings, Queens and Suffolk Counties, New York), Volume 1. New York: Joseph M. Silinonte, 1996. (See http://www.nostonesunturned.com)

Juliana Smith is the editor of the Ancestry Daily News and author of The Ancestry Family Historian's Address Book. She has written for Ancestry Magazine and Genealogical Computing. Juliana can be reached by e-mail at: editor@ancestry-inc.com but regrets that she is unable to assist with personal research.

An archive of her Monday columns, The Family History Compass, are available on the Ancestry.com site at: www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/compass/d_p_1_archive.asp