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Find the Mothers in Your Family Tree

By Jana Lloyd  - 04 May 2009

Before 1922, immigrant women to the U.S. were not required to naturalize. If they were married, they were listed under their husband’s surname on the census records. And before the 1850 census, they weren’t even listed at all—they were just given a tally mark. Combine that with the fact that for many years women couldn’t vote, own property, or enter into legal agreements, and you may find researching your female relatives a bit of a challenge.

Follow these seven tips to help find out more about your female ancestors—especially to locate their ever-elusive maiden names.

1. Look for mothers-in-law in census records. After their husbands died, many women went to live with children. You’ll often find mothers-in-law (and other in-laws for that matter) listed in census records. Finding out that Robert Jones’s mother-in-law was Peggy Thompson can tip you off that his dear wife may have been a Thompson pre-wedding day. Be careful though—the mother-in-law may be on a second or third last name.

2. Search the vital records of other family members. Don’t know great-grandmother’s maiden name? Check grandma’s birth certificate. Or marriage certificate. Or death certificate. And if you don’t find it listed there, check the vital records of other siblings and even half-siblings. Records changed from year to year and state to state, so information not included on one certificate might have been recorded on another.

3. Search local newspapers at the time. Besides birth, wedding, and death announcements, the personal columns of local newspapers can be very revealing. You might find that “Mr. and Mrs. X invited their daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Y, for Thanksgiving dinner.”

4. Conduct a thorough search of the husband’s records. For better or worse, you often find out about the women in your family tree by researching the men. The husband and father’s records usually offer the most information, but you may want to try those of brothers and other male relatives as well. One researcher looking through records from the Corp of Engineers in the 1890s was surprised to find a letter written to John Brown saying his sister had been turned down for a job. They had written to her brother—not her—to inform her that she had not been hired! A descendant would only have found this information by researching the brother’s name—not the woman’s. (See “10 Tough Ancestors,” in Ancestry Magazine.)

5. Pay attention to witnesses, neighbors, and friends. Witnesses were often family members, so male witnesses on a record may have been brothers, fathers, or uncles to any female mentioned. Neighbors on censuses, directories, and town maps are also potential in-laws. And, finally, women sometimes married brothers’ friends. “So what if John and Permelia died too soon to apply for a military pension?” writes Elizabeth Shown Mills, author of “Finding Wives, Mothers, and Old Women with Suitcases,” in Ancestry Magazine. “John’s presence on a muster roll gives us a list of fellow soldiers who could have lived longer, could have applied, and could have talked about John. ‘Me and John,’ one old veteran wrote in his pension affidavit, ‘me and John Pettypool dug them trenches together. Me and John were buddies, just like brothers. He married my sister.’”

6. Locate cemeteries. Records might not mention women’s last names, but headstones usually do. If you can locate a woman—either in person or on a list of cemetery records—buried beside her husband, you can often find out her unmarried name.

7. Understand the laws of the time. Get to know the culture and laws surrounding the area and time-period when your female family member was living. Understanding what records she may or may not have left behind can help you know what to search for. For instance, throughout most of the 19th century a single, divorced, or widowed woman, known as a “feme sole,” often produced more paperwork than a “feme covert,” or a married woman. She could enter into contracts, sue her debtors, and create a will. However, she lost most of these rights when she married. Beginning as early as 1850, though, married women in many states did exercise ownership over any property they had personally inherited or been given. This meant she could create a will or deed for her own personal property, apart from her husband’s.