Not Such Steady Progress

When equipped with a solid research plan, a family history student can make much progress delving into records that lead to answers. When distracted from that plan, well, let's just say there are no surprises when the results aren't as stellar.

What a week it has been, with people either rushing to "save" all their tiniest DNA matches, or bolstering their security against a wide variety of possible cyber-scams in the wake of news from two genealogy-related websites. Is it any surprise my usual research progress took a nosedive?

However, in the past two weeks, I've managed to find 151 more relatives associated with my maternal line, so my mother's tree now stands at 22,827. Considering the distractions, that was the best news, even though the pace of discovery was about half what was normally accomplished in prior biweekly periods. So at least I have something to feel good about. I didn't do so well on any of the other trees I manage.

Take my mother-in-law's tree. The only reason I managed to add ten more names to her tree was that I am switching all my father-in-law's entries to his wife's tree, simply on account of Ancestry's resource allowing us to pin our matches to their place in our family tree. Deciding to maintain two separate trees for my husband's parents—essentially, one tree for each of my daughter's grandparents—was not such a great strategy, but back when I made that decision, who knew we'd someday be pinning our DNA results to a pedigree chart? So, now my mother-in-law's tree contains 19,104 relatives' names.

As has happened for more weeks than I care to recall, both my father's tree and that of my father-in-law remained unmoved from their previous records. My dad's tree is still at 715 names, and my father-in-law's tree has 1,812 people. While not all of the names in those trees have been duplicated in their respective wives' trees, I am moving them as needed. That basically translates into adding branches of the tree when I get a DNA match who belongs in that vacant spot.

Hopefully, without any more exasperating news on the genealogical front in the next two weeks, research can return to normal and I can simultaneously trudge through records of my maternal ancestors' descendants and scour the baptismal records of County Kerry for my father-in-law's Falvey connections.