The fourth linking pattern is based on geography. For this one it helps to remember the rule that “The past is a foreign country,” because our ancestors lived in the same basic area their entire lives. In fact, they often stayed in the same small area for generations. This is very different than how we live today. And this rule is one that is constantly violated on public trees.
I grew up in a family of six children. At one point all six of us lived in different time zones across North America. In contrast to that, one of my ancestral lines lived in the same small parish from the time that the records began (late 1600s) until my direct ancestor crossed the Atlantic Ocean and immigrated to the US.
The reason this is helpful for family history is that it allows us to limit our possible family matches to a smaller geographic region. If you are looking for a marriage record, for example, you can be confident that a marriage that took place across the country can be ruled out for your ancestor, even if the name and age match what you are looking for. Please read that again!
A helpful tool for this type of research is, of course, a good map. I prefer to work with a map that shows the parish boundary lines. If we have several children christened in the same parish, it’s likely that all of the children from that family would be christened in the same parish. Again, this helps us to exclude the neighboring records that may show similar names to what we are hoping to find.
There are several published maps that may be helpful to research. However, my favorite maps to use right now are those on the FamilySearch wiki pages. Every country in Scandinavia has a wiki page, and the maps that appear on the home screen for each country are “clickable.” This means that when you click on the county of interest, you immediately go to the next page, which includes more detailed information about your area of interest. Additionally, as you continue to click through these maps, you will see the county boundaries. And when you click on the county names, you will find a page describing the county, including the names of farms that appear in that parish.
In our current time of research, we find so many online indexes to records. In Scandinavian research, using these indexes often produces a high amount of “false positive” results. This means that the results shown will include anyone with a name (and sometimes age) that matches your search parameters. Often a perfect match can be found, but once the location is examined, the supposed match can quickly be thrown out. Remembering the geographic constraints on our ancestors will help us find only those individuals who actually belong in our family trees.