Asking the Right Question: Part 3

Picture this scene: you absolutely love chocolate cake and have decided to bake your own. You’ve even bought a cake tin especially for the purpose. You’re thrilled. You can’t wait to get started. Whenever you look at the tin, you think, “that’s the chocolate cake tin”. It’s become so fixed in your mind as the chocolate cake tin that it doesn’t once occur to you to use it to make other flavours of cake: lemon, coffee, blueberry, vanilla…and so there’s a whole load of things you end up missing out on.

The same is true of research questions. If we become too narrowly focused on our research question, we can become trapped in a rut and fail to see the bigger picture. We may even end up missing relevant information which could be really useful in our research.

Let’s think about this some more…

Find the Right Tool for the Job – Then Use It Well

Previously, we’ve looked at what a research question is and why you might need one in Part 1, and thought about what the scope of your question should be in Part 2. We moved from the Haystack to a Polished approach to make sure our question was the right tool for the job: that it was capable of directing us to the right resources for our investigation.

Forming a question, though, is just the beginning. Just as owning the world’s best woodworking tools won’t suddenly make you a master carpenter, having a useful and well-considered research question doesn’t guarantee that you’ll automatically do the best research. You have to use the question in the right way for it to help!

So as well as thinking, “Is this a good question to ask?” we also need to be thinking, “How will I use this question to shape my research?”

So let’s think about the interplay between our research question and our search strategy.

Show Your Question Who’s Boss

A good research question is there to guide – not force – you through the research process. Remember that you’re the active partner in all of this. Even a good question applied too dogmatically can hinder rather than help.

Suppose you’re trying to find a birth record for your ancestor, Diana Elizabeth Forsyte. You’ve developed a question and now you’re starting to do the research. What aspects of your search might require some flexible thinking? Here are some suggestions…

1. Transcriptional Errors: How do you know that the transcriber has read your ancestor’s name correctly and typed it into the database without error? Maybe a transcriber has misread Diana’s surname as Forsyth, not Forsyte?
2. Variation in Name Presentation: Are you making too many assumptions about how Diana’s name was registered originally? “It couldn’t possibly be her, I’m looking for someone called Diana Elizabeth!” Perhaps Diana was actually called Elizabeth or Beth or Bessie on some records? Or did she switch the ordering of her names sometimes and appear as Elizabeth Diana? You’ll need to bear these variants in mind.
3. Variation in search algorithms: Search engines on different sites use their own algorithms to determine your search results (as well as employing different transcribers!). Rival sites usually provide different results in a different order: be prepared for some scrolling and refining at this stage. One site may cause you to miss a result which is obvious when searching with another provider – especially if you’re too blinkered in terms of what you’re expecting to find.
4. Gaps in the underlying record or index: Perhaps the search provider has not yet transcribed all the relevant entries for a particular time window. Or maybe some of the original records were destroyed? If you forget to check for index gaps, you may falsely assume that Diana wasn’t born in England or Wales.

Allowing your research question to dominate to the exclusion of all else can cause as many problems as having a question that’s too vague. Keep your mind open to the possibility of individuals not appearing the way you’re expecting, and you’ll be poised to find new routes through those brick walls. You’ll be in control, rather than your question calling all the shots.

If you’d like to see how this might work with a real research task, then read on…

The Return of Charlotte Oliphant

Do you remember Charlotte OLIPHANT from the PEARSON family tree? Let’s take another look at our research into her and see how our focus might need to adapt as we use our research question.

We were asking the question:

WHEN and WHERE did Charlotte OLIPHANT (b. 12 April 1879, Carlisle), later PEARSON, die?

This question has given us a clear objective of locating Charlotte’s death, starting within English civil registration records. But if we’re showing this question who’s boss, we need to remember that Charlotte’s name and other details may not appear in this precise form within the records.

Our question leads us initially to the England and Wales Civil Registration Death Index. For a bit of variety, and to open this up to people who don’t have commercial subscriptions, I’m going to show some of this as FreeBMD searches.

Running this search in the death indexes, it seems that Charlotte didn’t die as a PEARSON in Carlisle over 1929-79 (N.B. You should also make yourself aware of possible gaps in your index though!). Could she have died elsewhere in England or Wales instead?

A broader search for all registration districts gives you well over 100 results – a lot to work through! To be thorough, I’ve taken an extract of all the Charlotte PEARSON deaths over this period. (I’ll look at extracts in more detail in a future blog post, and I highly recommend Helen Osborn’s book, Genealogy: Essential Research Methods, which covers the process in depth).

Using my knowledge of Charlotte’s presumed DOB, I can eliminate many of the entries from my extract based on age at death. Comparing remaining entries against the National Probate Calendar over the same years, the matches drop away until there don’t appear to be any good matches on our list for Charlotte PEARSON. What should we do next?

If we were too focused on the specific question we’ve set ourselves, we might say, “I’m looking for a Charlotte PEARSON and she’s not died in England or Wales. I need to look elsewhere.” This might make us shift our focus to another country, such as Scotland. But we’d be missing something.

What our searches have shown is that Charlotte’s death, if it did occur in England, was not registered under the name PEARSON. Looking again at the family tree, it seems that Charlotte was only fifty when her husband George died in 1929. What is the most likely reason for a woman appearing under a different name during her adult life? Marriage.

Introducing the Sub-Question

This hypothesis extends our view of our original question and introduces a sub-question: “Did Charlotte PEARSON née Oliphant remarry after the death in 1929 of her husband George?”

Let’s go to FreeBMD and use its marriage index search. Oral history suggests that the family was tied to Carlisle, so we’ll bear that in mind as a possible remarriage location. If we look for a marriage for Charlotte PEARSON in Carlisle, any time from Q4 1929 onwards, we obtain 2 results: one with a middle name (we might need to bear this in mind too, even if we’re not following up on it right now) and one for a basic “Charlotte Pearson”: ref. Q1 1933 Carlisle 10B 706. Spouse SCOTT.

This is a fantastic lead to follow, but needs firming up if we’re going to accept it. Think about context: what record set are we likely to find the newly-married Charlotte in? The 1939 Register.

A quick search of this set turns up Charlotte and George SCOTT living at Currock Road in Carlisle – the very address listed on George PEARSON jnr.’s marriage certificate – and with Charlotte SCOTT’s date of birth an exact match for our existing info for Charlotte PEARSON. We have found her!

If we’d been too blinkered and let our question dominate our thinking completely, we might not have considered a remarriage for Charlotte. We could have easily been led down a rabbit hole of searching only for a Charlotte PEARSON death instead of considering the most likely alternatives. Charlotte was there in Carlisle all along, but under a different name and with a new spouse.

If we repeat our search of the death indexes, but this time looking for Charlotte SCOTT and searching over the period 1933 – 1979, we find her entry very quickly in 1956. The corresponding certificate matches for names, addresses and other details so it’s definitely a match. Our initial research question wasn’t enough in its own right: we needed flexible thinking and perseverance too.

Do You Have the SAID Elements?

Using your question well is a balancing act. The question acts like the climbing frame for your research: Structure and Direction. Once you’re climbing, you have to make the effort to hold on as you climb, to change direction when needed and to watch where you’re going if you’re going to reach the top. As the researcher, you provide the Innovation and Action.

When we were working through the Charlotte OLIPHANT problem, we established a sound question that provided direction and structure. Our question only took on value when it was actually used – we had to take action. When we couldn’t find Charlotte’s death as a PEARSON, we had to innovate and consider how else her name might appear in the records and why. Furthermore, our initial question was refined enough to contain cross-referencing details (Charlotte’s DOB) which helped in triangulating between records to confirm a positive match. We didn’t get caught in a Haystack!

Together, these four elements (SAID) help to support a healthy research process – two elements from you, and two from your question. Next time you hit a brick wall, check whether one of those four things is missing: perhaps making up the missing element will help you break through!