Recently when I was doing German parish research at the Family History Library, I heard a woman’s voice with a slight accent thanking someone for their help with someone else’s research problem.  It sounded like they were working to identify the family’s place of origin and they had either eliminated some of the possible locations or found the correct location.  Their conversation ended with the comment, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.”

This is a phrase used by my family often.  My dad always said that when he was trying something and it didn’t work out.  He would say, “There is always more than one way to skin a cat,” and he would figure out a different approach.  This approach to life and problems worked well.

It is also a good approach or attitude to have when solving family history research problems.  When I was a volunteer at a Family History Center some patrons were resistant to new search strategies, and some patrons welcomed new ideas.  The latter were much more successful in their research.

Sometimes we need a new approach to our family history research problems.  Recently, I was researching Lula (Gray) Hollander.  I located her in three U. S. Federal Censuses with her husband, Thomas Hollander, and was looking for information on her birth family. I located her Texas death certificate on the Family Search Records Pilot. According to her death certificate, filled out by her daughter, Mrs. Martha Coats, Lula was born on 2 January 1870 in Lea County, Texas.  (Lea County, Texas was not formed in 1870.) Lula was the daughter of John Gray and Emily Wright. I searched for other children of John Gray and Emily Wright, and the only result was Lula!  That search was too narrow, so I searched for children of John Gray, but there were far too many to be helpful.  When I searched using the parents’s surnames only, I got twelve results!  After eliminating those that were obviously not her siblings because of the age span between Lula’s birth and theirs, I had one candidate, William Gray, born two years after Lula.

William Gray‘s death certificate said he was the son of J. M. Gray and Emma Right, not Wright. With this information, it is not a surprise that my earliest attempt did not locate Lula’s brother. I used this new information and found Lula, her brother William, and their parents John and Elisabeth Gray, along with their five siblings, in the 1880 U. S. Federal Census. From there I was able to trace the family through additional censuses.

If I had stopped after the first search for Lula’s family in the Texas Death Certificates, I would still be at a dead end for this family. My willingness to try a different method helped me solve this research session, or as they like to say on the international floor of the Family History Library, “skin the cat.”