Playing Catch-Up

 

Can one ever play catch-up with genealogy?

This month, since I'm working on the family tree of a step-mother in my father-in-law's ancestry, there obviously won't be any DNA component to check; Theresa Blaising and the Stevens family are relatives by marriage only. There were no half-siblings descended from Theresa to blend in with her husband's previous children.

That was my inspiration for launching a different weekend project for the month of August: catch up on all the DNA matches backlogged from that side of the family. This may or may not work. Consider that the flow of new DNA matches has slowed to a trickle ever since the Golden State Killer mystery was solved—thanks to genetic genealogy—and that puts a different frame around the picture of my husband's newest DNA matches. 

Since the beginning of June, my husband has gained only fifteen new DNA matches—and that's only at Ancestry.com. I imagine the other testing sites have experienced the same slowdown. In the last month alone, my husband received only two new matches. Not much to work with in numbers that low.

Not to worry, though, for in total, my husband currently has 1,340 matches at just Ancestry alone. I'd say that's a lot of catch-up work to be done there, despite all the handy tools such as Ancestry's ThruLines program.

If I ever can catch up with that moving target—hopefully, there will be more matches added as the months roll on—there are other tasks to complete. Popping over to the various tree-building sites I've added over the years, I can work on updating the information on each month's Twelve Most Wanted as I dig further into their documentation. Working step-by-step and simultaneously in different programs may be just the way to catch up on workloads there.

Still, for all those promises, I sometimes wonder if there is even such a state as being "caught up." With each step backwards in time, we double the number of ancestors we are researching. At some point, that task will achieve a critical mass of impossibility—a reality we all need to face. I'm seeing that this year as I bang my head against that genealogical brick wall in a couple of my father-in-law's lines.

As the forward momentum staggers, perhaps the best resolution is to look sideways at the collateral lines for clues and DNA match connections, then finally to look backwards at all the organizational clean-up that still needs attention. In my in-laws' tree of well over thirty thousand, there certainly is a lot of cleaning to catch up on.