How Do I Know Those Are My People?

As I've searched to find the lives of my ancestors many times I've asked (or been asked), "How do I know those are my people?" How do you really know? You don't, until you do. Many times there are people with the same names, I've found two men named Herman Lucht in the same county, same birth location, immigration is a decade apart, and birth years are a few years different but one is my ancestor and one isn't (at least not that I've found...yet) So how do I know which is which?

I started with what I knew. Luckily my dad told lots of stories about his family so I knew
   A. where my ancestor is buried.
   B. who his children are including my grandmother and her sisters and brother.
   C. The location where they lived.

After that I was back to the "but how do you know?"

I decided to create a lineage document so I could follow down the line to verify that I had the right people.

I found the easiest way was to use an Excel spreadsheet.  Starting with my great grandfather and great grandmother I added them to a column. I included their birth and death dates. In the next column I added their children, one on each row. Now I merged the 5 lines in my great grandparents row. 

I continued adding children and spouse's. Adding rows and merging where needed. Sometimes I work backwards if a name comes up, sometimes working forward when I find an obituary or some other type of information. 

After a bit of time I have a pretty good chart although it's hundreds of people short. My Lucht family now goes nine generations starting with Peter Lucht (1758-1837 and Anna Schwanke ( 1756-1807). It includes their son Peter Lucht (1798-1846) and his wife Dorothy Zikuf (1796-1848), their 9 children, some of their children...and some of their children all the way up to their 6th great grandsons. 

Now as I've searched my genealogy once in a while the name I'm searching will be right but the name of the  children doesn't match up. This is my clue to start retracing a line to find out where the problem comes from. 

Next post will be how this has helped me to identify people in a photograph.