Genealogy Wisdom: Use a Pencil

The best advice I’ve ever received about genealogy is this: Keep all your records in pencil (with an eraser!) so they can be amended and corrected. No matter how certain you are that your sources are correct, the risk remains that something has been mistaken, misunderstood, or miscommunicated.

When I was young, my mother told me that one of her cousins had researched the family tree, tracing ancestors back to the noble house of Derby in England. He had even paid to have a table made with the Derby family crest. This cousin died, his wife remarried, and no one knew what had been done with his table or with his research notes.

More recent research has revealed that the family has no connection to the noble house of Derby. The name in my family is, in fact, a garbling of McDermott. Francis McDermott, born in Ireland in 1717, came to the colony of New York and settled in the Hudson River valley among a community of Dutch and German settlers who struggled to record his (to them) unusual name. In various records it appears as Macdurmund, Mektermoed, Mackderbi, McDarby, and McDerbe before finally being established as Derby after 1820. Part of the family relocated to Michigan and then to Illinois, where much of the family still lives today.

My great-grandfather, Alvin Derby, spent some time in Arkansas, although I have not been able to discover why he came or what work he did. I know only that he married Louisa Catherine Carter on July 11, 1886. On their marriage license, they both reported that they lived in Strickler, Washington County, Arkansas. Strickler, I have learned, was once a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail Route. It is possible that Alvin worked on the construction of the Frisco Railroad (the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway) between Fort Smith and Fayetteville, but nothing in Alvin’s career suggests railroad work. The 1880 census records him as a farm laborer in Illinois; later records call him a cabinet maker and a nicker (which is a specialized carpenter). Alvin and Louisa Derby were living in Illinois within ten years of their marriage, which suggests that Alvin’s time in Arkansas was relatively brief.

Louisa’s family inadvertently created confusion in official records. Her father, Charles Lambert Carter, was a farmer who was born and raised in the area of McMinnville, Tennessee. His parents moved to Missouri when he was young, but they died while he was still a boy, and he and his brothers returned to Tennessee. The young men fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; after the war ended, Charles moved to Arkansas and bought several sections of land in the northwestern part of the state. The Washington County census taker included Charles, his wife, and seven of his children in the 1870 census.

The Crawford County census taker in 1870 did the same.

The names of the family members are recorded differently, and the Washington County record makes Charles and his wife Nancy impossibly young—each 28 years old, with a child 17 years old. A researcher needs to know the family history thoroughly before realizing that these listings describe the same household—thus also inflating the population of Arkansas for the 1870 census.

Incidentally, while my great-great grandfather was serving in the Confederate army during the Civil War, my wife’s great-great-grandfather was drafted into the Federal army. A recent immigrant, he served in a German-speaking company from Illinois. Both soldiers fought at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. After studying the battle reports from both armies, I can say that it is likely—but by no means certain—that they were near enough to have fired shots at each other on the nineteenth of September. If either of them had been a little more accurate, my children would never have been born.

Pondering that possibility brings my thoughts back to the beginning of this post. When researching our ancestors, we must be prepared to erase information that we thought we knew. Often those “facts” are not as factual as we once thought. At the same time, history itself has a way of erasing possibilities. Wars, famines, natural disasters, and other events constantly intervene, establishing what is and erasing what might have been. Researching genealogy can remind us of the fragility of our existence, a sobering thought amid the exciting discoveries to be found in our family histories.

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Explore genealogy resources available from the Central Arkansas Library System, and save the date for the upcoming genealogy workshop (more information to come!):

2026 Genealogy Workshop
CALS Main Library Darragh Center
Saturday, November 7, 2026

And come see us in the Research Room of the CALS Bobby L. Roberts Library of Arkansas History & Art. Visit the CALS website (opens in new window) for Roberts Library visiting information (opens in new window).

Steve Teske is an archivist at the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies/Roberts Library.