Keeping Track Until I'm Back on Track

It's time to see just how much gets done when one is off, having fun at conferences. As it turns out, not much—but it was at least better than zero progress on the research front for the past two weeks.

I've been keeping track of my research progress for a few years now, and even though it doesn't necessarily mean I'll keep my nose to the grindstone during special events like conferences, my charts show me that, whether quick or slow, my work does move me ahead toward my family history goals. That is all the encouragement I need.

This past week, I've been in Salt Lake City, attending the Professional Management Conference of the Association of Professional Genealogists. That meant a few days ahead of the trip, I was busy packing, as well as working ahead on other projects so I could be "free" to enjoy the event I was attending. Here's what happened during the remainder of that two-week period.

As far as adding more names to the four main family trees I'm currently working on, I added sixty eight new individuals to my mother-in-law's tree, mostly owing to discovery of another recent obituary for one of her distant cousins. Yes, those families are big, but one obituary can provide names from three or more generations, so now her tree includes 16,979 people.

Though not as dramatic an increase, my father's tree managed to see a modest increase of eight names, bringing his total to 620. That progress, though small, came thanks to information discovered in the process of tracing my newly-found DNA matches which link to my paternal side. No matter how slowly this tree advances, I'm still elated, because this family was such an enigma—until DNA.

While those two trees came with successes, the other two stood stock still over these past two weeks. My father-in-law's tree still remains at 1,551. My mother's tree—the one I want to focus on in preparation for the Virginia research class I'm taking at SLIG next January—is now stuck at 19,123.

No matter; I'll be back home and back to work in no time.