Not Bad, For all That Complaining

So I had a bad week. Thankfully, there was a lot of support, and I got through it all—especially thankful for your support in particular. But when it came to tallying my biweekly research progress, I just had to cringe. After all, there were a few days when I just couldn't bring myself to do much of anything, and a few more days when I spent the entire time putting out fires and attending to the upheaval that comes when things go wrong. I had no idea what that was going to do to my counts.

As it turned out, not much damage at all, though I did have to sit myself down and force myself to do what used to flow from a position of sheer joy. I found out: I'll get over it. Life goes on. I may as well put my running shoes back on and catch up to the race.

So here's how things turned out in the past two weeks of research. My mother's tree—that southern-focused collection of "kin"—saw 275 more names added, including supporting documentation, to bring her count to 17,556 individuals. I guess things weren't as bad as they felt like they were.

Of course, I've maintained a steady diet of doing absolutely nothing on my in-laws' trees, so my mother-in-law's count stays constant at 15,996 and my father-in-law's tree is unchanged at 1,515. But with that DNA discovery of a missing branch of my paternal grandmother's line, I was able to add six more individuals to the puniest of my family trees—my dad's tree, which now stands at 530 names.

Having recently returned from a DNA conference and now teaching a genetic genealogy class locally, I'm keeping my eye on the numbers for all the DNA tests I administer. I had been concerned that numbers weren't keeping up their usual brisk pace of increase lately, but the past two weeks allay a bit of that concern. My test matches were up twenty one at Family Tree DNA, though only nine at 23andMe. I now have 3,504 and 1,104 matches, respectively, at those two companies. MyHeritage has numbers which are far beyond that ballpark, with 7,479 matches total, up eighty three from two weeks ago, but that count includes distant cousins beyond the range I normally consider. On the other hand, Ancestry's match count for fourth cousin and closer cuts off at the thousand mark, so I haven't had an easy way to determine the count there for weeks, now.

For the next two weeks, my research goal—should I agree to accept getting back into action here—will focus on more work on my mother's tree, as well as completing that new branch of my father's Laskowski line, thanks to this new cousin match. On my mother's tree, I've moved from the McClellan line—the one associated with King Stockton's mother's saga—to the Tison line. If I can zero in on whether it was a McClellan or a Tison in the roots of Hester, that would be superb, though I'm not yet sure whether I have enough information to follow such a study. Thus, holding the course on the Tison line for now will be the best approach.