When I've worked on my mother-in-law's Metzger line in the past, I always could count on the numbers for my biweekly count ratcheting upwards fairly quickly. Why? Almost all of her relatives were Catholic; in the past, that could mean lots of large families to track.
Now, however, it seems a struggle to document some of the branches of her second great-grandfather Michael Metzger's tree. The documentation just doesn't seem to be there. Perhaps that is a combination of Michael's being a newly-arrived immigrant plus a time frame occurring before listing household names became the routine with the 1850 census.
Still, in the past two weeks, from records in Michael's adopted home in Perry County, Ohio, and the Indiana location of some of his descendants, I've managed to document 301 more names in my mother-in-law's tree. That means I now have 35,346 individuals connected with her, up to the sixth cousin level for DNA matching purposes.
Though I still am unable to push back another generation on this Metzger line—after all, second great-grandparents is not that far back in time—I am working on completing each line of descent while I probe for possible connections to the past. Remembering the F.A.N. Club principle, reaching out to distant cousins for clues, and inspecting all documents for overlooked information have been my next steps. So far, no leads. But we keep on researching, anyhow. The answer is out there somewhere.
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