Why I Build Family Trees to Rule People Out

When people think about building family trees, they usually assume the goal is to add ancestors. In practice, much of my work involves doing the opposite. I often build trees specifically to exclude people.

This happens most often when I am researching someone with a common name. A good example from my own work is a woman named Mary W. Magee, Magie, or McGee, who married my ancestor Solomon Anderson. I am trying to identify her before their marriage, in the years leading up to the 1870 census.

The challenge is not a lack of candidates but an excess of them. There are multiple women with similar names, similar ages, and similar locations in nearby Illinois counties. None stand out as an obvious match, and none can be confidently dismissed at a glance. Trying to keep all of them straight mentally quickly becomes unmanageable.

This is where test trees come in. Instead of guessing, I create separate trees for each plausible Mary and follow each one forward in time. To avoid confusion, I name these trees clearly, such as “Mary Magee – Test” or “Mary McGee (1860 candidate)”, so it is obvious they are working hypotheses rather than confirmed ancestors.

If I can track a Mary through later records and find her married to someone else, living elsewhere, or clearly accounted for after the point when my Mary should have appeared, I can exclude her. She is not my ancestor.

I repeat this process for each candidate. Some of these trees only require a few records. Others involve tracing parents, siblings, and later census appearances. The goal is not to prove that a candidate is my Mary, but to demonstrate that she is not.

This approach prevents me from forcing a connection simply because a name looks right, and it creates a clear record of why certain people were eliminated. That documentation matters, especially when research stalls or needs to be revisited. Genealogy is not just about finding the right person. It is about systematically ruling out the wrong ones, and sometimes the most valuable trees are the ones that never become part of the final family line.

If you are stuck sorting through multiple candidates with the same name, I offer professional research services to help untangle those kinds of problems.