Case study: subtle clues in population registers  On the very
first day I started doing genealogy, I found a birth record
saying that my grandfather’s grandmother was born as an
illegitimate child, father unknown. Three years later, her
mother married and the groom acknowledged the child as his. The
three-year-gap made me dismiss him as her biological father. In
the 23 years since then, I’ve collected all documents I could
find about this family but never found any viable candidates.
Inspired by Dr. Thomas Jones’ lecture about maximizing clues in
evidence,1 I decided to go over my sources again. I noticed one
document: an 1860-1870 population register, one of the documents
I remember seeing on that very first day in 1990. Population
registers are somewhat like a continuous census: every page
shows all the people living in a house during the period of the
register. People that are born or move in get added, people who
die or move away get struck through.  Population register   For
one particular address (Haag