Balancing Act

It's a dream life when one can research her family history, unhampered by obligations of daily life.

Who are we kidding here? That never happens. Especially after having to tap dance double time upon returning home from travels. So, once again, I find myself at the end of a two week span, not having accomplished much more research than I had in the prior weeks on the road. Life is a balancing act, where work, play, study, meetings and mundane obligations all try to cram into the same space at the same time.

Maybe someday, it will all slow down, I tell myself. Or at least I'll develop the knack of simultaneously meeting commitments from multiple facets of my life.

As far as this time's research goes, it looks like my mother in law's tree is winning the name count derby. Her family tree now sports 10,615 family members, after adding a modest forty two additional names in this sequence. My mother's tree is not that far behind—up eighty six to 9,782—so with a little push in the next two weeks, maybe we'll balance out the attention spent on each side of the family.

Of course, not a whit of work has been accomplished on my father's line or my father in law's family. Now, there's a lot of "balancing act" I owe. Only problem is, I'm not sure exactly how I'll be able to break through on those research quandaries.

Monitoring our DNA matches lately has made me wish it were time for another whopping sales offer. At Family Tree DNA, I've received an additional twenty nine matches to bring my total to 1,924—a good number, though certainly not the astounding 206 I received once the winter holiday sale bulge finally worked its way through the FTDNA system at the end of February. Ancestry has slowed down even more, giving me an additional eleven matches in the past two weeks for a total of 500 matches. How's that for round numbers?

Those number patterns get repeated when I look at my husband's matches. FTDNA increased twenty six for him over the past two weeks. He now has 1,227 matches at FTDNA, and 238 at Ancestry, up six.

Still, the up side was that both of us had some promising contacts with matches—one of which was a Flowers line descendant who actually contacted us, a refreshing switch from the usual process. Meanwhile, I've also added two more family members' tests to the list of DNA results I'm tracking as administrator. On top of that, since 23andMe just offered a sale, I sprang for it for a test for myself, so now both my husband and I have tested at three different companies.

With the advent of DNA testing offers from such companies as Living DNA and MyHeritage, I'm not sure we'll spring for yet another two tests for the family. However, since a niece recently asked for my input on her family's tests with MyHeritage, I may as well face the learning curve there and familiarize myself with their readouts and tools—not to mention, brush up on my spreadsheet skills. This is becoming way too much data to just carry around in my head.

Above: Spring in the Mountains, 1912 oil on canvas by Swiss painter Giovanni Giacometti; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.