My ancestors faced many choices throughout their lives: whether to stay put or migrate (most chose to migrate, obviously), whom to marry (usually someone from within their community), whether young men should go to war, and what occupation to pursue (anything other than “farmer” would have been a major departure). But this prompt makes me think less about their choices and more about the many possibilities and decisions I face in my own genealogical research.
When reading family narratives or watching shows like Finding Your Roots, I am often struck by the excitement people feel when they discover ancestors three or four generations back. My challenge is somewhat different. Many of my American lines extend 300 to 400 years into the past. In FamilySearch, I examined my calculated heritage eight generations back—roughly to the time of the founding of the United States—and found that about 82% of my ancestors were already living in what became the United States. As a result, I face an embarrassment of riches. (Math note: twelve generations back gives us 2¹², or 4,096 individuals—and all the people in between!)
The challenge, then, is deciding how to approach my research and which lines to pursue. A few years ago, I developed a plan: start with my paternal side, work through each great-grandparent line, confirm known lineages, focus on my brick walls, and then move “rightward” across my tree (or fan chart, depending on one's preference). That approach worked reasonably well until I encountered my first major brick wall. After spending too much time banging my head against it, I set my research aside for a while.
The decision to tackle brick walls one at a time proved to be a significant time sink. Last year, however, encouraged by the Generations Café site, I started my blog. The need to write stories forced me to look beyond my brick walls and search for interesting narratives elsewhere in my tree. In the process, I began making progress on several lines that had long resisted my research attempts.
By digging deeper, I was able to see migration patterns more clearly and learn more about my ancestors' families and communities. I explored records that I had previously overlooked, such as the agricultural census schedules, and gained a richer understanding of the times in which my ancestors lived.
New tools also opened up new possibilities. FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search allowed me to uncover records that had effectively been hidden for decades, providing new insights into people, places, and events. Artificial intelligence tools became an important part of my research and writing process as well. I used ChatGPT to help gather, organize, and evaluate disparate pieces of information, generating hypotheses and possible conclusions that I could then assess using my own experience and judgment. Trust, but verify.
With so much progress made in 2025, I expected 2026 to be a year focused primarily on confirmation and tree maintenance, and a blogging hiatus. Some of that has happened. I have added substantial documentation to FamilySearch and corrected numerous entries. Yet my locally maintained tree remains largely unchanged.
For that change of plans, I blame a flood of newly available land and probate records and the resulting expansion of several family lines. Much of my effort has gone into improving my portion of the collaborative FamilySearch tree, adding notes, sources, and explanations for future researchers. As a result, local tree cleanup and pension-file indexing are still waiting for me.
But sometimes opportunities are simply too tempting to ignore. My planned writing hiatus has yet to materialize. Instead, I continue to feel the urge to document new discoveries, liberally interpret each week’s prompts, and keep the momentum going.
No comments:
Post a Comment