For anyone who has worked on a family tree, it often turns out more challenging than expected and sometimes simple mistakes can quickly send you down the wrong path.

This month marks a year since I started working on the “Baker” family tree and I can tell you it’s like watching the World Series, one minute it’s heartbreak and the next it’s euphoria.

My parents and their siblings didn’t talk about their past or their ancestors, so we really didn’t know much about our own family prior to 1920. For all we knew, we could be descendants of, well, Americans, who have been here since the Jamestown Colony or Plymouth, Mass.

That’s not the case. What was found is that Michael Becker and his wife Mary, came to the United States from Germany in 1848. Through a lot of research, I was able to find out tthey boarded a ship called the Governor Davis in Le Havre, France and sailed to New Orleans, not Ellis Island, Boston or Philadelphia.

Upon arriving at the port of New Orleans and taking a riverboat up to St. Louis, they changed their name to Baker. But at this point, things got dicey because it turned out genealogy websites had incorrect information.

One website had her name as Mary, one said her name was Maria. As I researched this person who was my great-great grandmother, the computer always generated the name “Polly Baker,” who was an immigrant woman to Long Island, New York, thus the dates and children didn’t match.

Since they settled in Logan County, Illinois, one day I ran across an Illinois legal document telling me her name was actually Anna Maria Loe and everyone called her Mary. Mystery solved? No, not so fast.

Genealogy sites and other family trees had her and Michael moving to Wayne County, Nebraska and living there until their deaths in the 1890s. I found a Nebraska cemetery yearbook from 1949 that had Michael passing away at age 34 in Lincoln, Illinois and Mary moving to Ohio.

My gut told me otherwise so I kept digging until I came across a probate document proving that Michael was 47 when he died, in Logan County, Illinois, in 1867. Likewise, Mary stayed in Illinois after her husband’s death and died in Lincoln, Ill., in 1869.

It was two of their sons who homesteaded in Wayne County, Nebraska, so somewhere along their lineage, someone made a mistake and threw everyone else off track, myself for nearly a year.

And, as a student of history, one thing that bothers me a lot is that others building family trees won’t look for specific dates or specific names. One of the sons, Nicholas M. Baker was a Nebraska homesteader. Nicholas A. Baker, from the same immediate family, lived and died in Illinois, but I’ve been finding out a lot of people building their own family trees don’t differentiate the two.

If you study genealogy, you’ll know that during certain times in history, a husband and wife would often times name more than one child with the same name, only a different middle initial. Or, if a child died, the next born would have the same name as the one who passed away.

That gets really confusing and nearly every entry has to be cross referenced for that reason. As an example, 251 Michael Beckers landed in New Orleans in 1848. There were also four Mary Beckers and one Mary Baker.

Another son, Peter, later homesteaded in Nebraska. He and his wife had a son William Peter, who in turn, homesteaded in Emmons County, North Dakota in 1907. William Peter was my grandfather.

And that brings me to another crucial mistake. Someone was building a family tree and had all of my dad’s siblings, except for one problem. They arbitrarily added another brother named Roy. My dad had 13 siblings and I’m 100 percent certain he didn’t have a brother name Roy.

It seems relatively easy to find ancestors. It’s the cross referencing that becomes a challenge. As an example, Logan County, Illinois didn’t keep death records until 1870, but it was a state of Illinois document that showed the proof of Michael and Mary’s lives and deaths in the state of Illinois.

It’s a challenging hobby, but one that also brings great satisfaction when you can actually re-create history with absolute and correct information.