Some Fly; Some Crawl

 

When it comes to genealogy, some weeks of research just fly by. Others barely crawl. These past two weeks have been examples of the latter.

With hope eternal, I always return to those research puzzles which keep me stumped, concerning my father-in-law's fairly recent Irish roots. I'm not sure why, but each time I revisit these research questions, I hope for a better result than the last time I passed by this way. Perhaps I should learn from such experiences.

That said, the numbers show what I mean. It's time for my biweekly progress report, and on my father-in-law's tree, I've only managed to add sixty four new names. While that may seem like a decent number, it pales in comparison to the months when I work on either my mother-in-law's line or my own mother's ancestry. Still, my in-laws' tree has 33,122 people documented now. While most of the past two weeks' progress can be attributed to adding cousins descended from the Flannery and Tully line couple I've been struggling with, at least there is some momentum.

On my own parents' tree, since I have ongoing projects still churning out results in the background, it was interesting to see about the same level of progress as with my in-laws' tree. I added sixty three new individuals to a tree which now totals 33,899 documented individuals, mostly descendants of collateral lines to help me with placing DNA matches in my tree.

With my father-in-law's Irish roots, it is becoming more clear to me that the only way to determine which lines are related to him may well be through DNA testing. Unless more records are discovered in Ireland, my only other hope is that further developments in Ontario, Canada, may uncover the records needed from that portion of the family's multi-step immigration process.

At this point, I'm banking on the Canadian side of the equation far more than I can ever hope for the Irish part. The realities of historic record keeping can sometimes take a harsh toll on our hopes to learn more about our family's roots.