A Brand New To-Do List

 

Starting a new project always throws the unexpected into one's path. That, at least, is my story, now that I've jumped into the collaborative possibilities at WikiTree. Well, let me amend that. "Jump" is too strong a word. How about "seeped" or "oozed"? Something more like molasses in January.

Speaking of January, that is usually when I assemble my research to-do list, and that becomes my working plan for the entire upcoming year. No room for detours, usually. This weekend, though, I made an exception—and ended up with a brand new to-do list to merge with the current one. 

My hope was to be more collaborative with the discoveries I've uncovered in the past kazillion years of chasing my family's stories. Another instigative shove I owe to the lonely fact that there aren't too many of my relatives out there, at least on some of my lines. Perhaps someone else is puzzling over those same family history mysteries, as well.

Once I crashed into the realization that uploading my thirty five thousand name GEDCOM into WikiTree was not the best of ideas—even if I used my stripped down version—I settled down to the drudge work of starting from scratch, one name at a time. Of course, that meant uploading information on references, too. But what do you do when some of those documents were obtained pre-Internet via snail mail (and its obligatory six-week waiting period)? 

That's where my weekend got hung up. It was a simple footnote to my paternal grandfather's date of death. Fortunately for me, those New York City records are now supposedly uploaded to various online genealogical resources, so I took what I thought would be a quick peek to see if online searches would once again save me some time.

Wrong. Once again, my ancestors found a way to hide in the cracks, so back to the notebooks it was to pull up the stored hard copy of my grandfather's death certificate. Granted, those old three ring binders did not age well in the past, um, forty years since I've first been at this paper chase. But that didn't matter; of all the records in those multiple binders, the entire file on that specific family was not in that storage collection.

In the meantime, I cleaned up all those stored files on the other family lines, tossed duplicates of records I've already noted, and digitized documents I still needed to add to my records online. And then, there were just a few more minutes left to compose profile entries on WikiTree for three ancestors: my dad, my mysterious paternal grandfather of the top-secret origin, and his wife—none of whom have matches within that vast WikiTree database.

Let's just say I've managed to get a jump on my spring cleaning chores. But not much else.