I opened the Ancestry.com app on my iPad for just a quick moment when notice some very interesting hints and photos that I had never seen before. Much of this information came as a result of the siblings that I have listen in the tree. Many times when we make our family trees, we like to focus on the parents of each generation. Because of the priority we place on finding the next set of parents, skip right through the siblings and beginning to look for the next generation of the family. When we do this we miss one of the most powerful tools of reaching not only the next generation, but possibly further down the line. Finding the siblings has become even more important with the entry of computers and the internet where the presence of siblings can speed up the search at a remarkable pace.
Including the siblings in the family tree creates so many opportunities because it provides the research so many more options. A simple search for a person’s name on ancestry may produce census results, a birth record, maybe a couple of more records here and there. One or two of these may point to the parents and maybe with luck one of these include the grandparents. A simple search for a mother with all of the siblings allows the researcher as many options as there are siblings, if not even more. While you may be the only family historian researching your immediate family tree, you may find a distant cousin on the other side of the country digging to find their family tree as well. You have information they need, and they have information you need. Beyond the social options available, each individual in the family contains their own records. In those records maybe the golden nugget you are looking for. They have the same parents, but the maybe older or young and may open the door to an amazing amount of information.
As you build your family tree, makes sure you remember to include the siblings all of the way up the tree. This will help in the immediate future, but more importantly may reveal itself useful several years down the road when you least expect it.