Playing Catch-Up

 

Weekends are for playing catch-up in my schedule. There are so many genealogical loose ends to tie up, and my default method is to tackle them over the quiet times at the end of the week. 

Mostly, the focus is on that multitude of DNA matches for the accounts I manage. Since I've been focusing on my in-laws' tree this month, on the weekends I've been pursuing some lines linked to a branch of the family through which I received an inquiry. "How do we connect?" can become the impetus for making that family tree just a bit bushier as we sketch out possible relationships with our mystery matches.

With DNA inquiries like that, it's no surprise to see that my in-laws' tree grew by 225 more documented family members in the past two weeks. And I still have a lot of unanswered questions! Over the years, that tree has grown to 36,509 people, mostly by adding descendant lines of all the third great-grandparents in this family line.

Since my research focus this month pertains to my father-in-law's ancestry, it's no surprise that my own tree had no additions whatsoever in the past two weeks. My tree is still set at 38,421 individuals, same as it was two weeks ago.

That, however, is not the case with new DNA matches. In the past two weeks at Ancestry.com alone, I gained eleven more matches, whereas my husband's match count goes up there by the much slower rate of about one to three matches in each biweekly check. Once I make the switch back to researching my own ancestry in the fall, hopefully those new DNA matches will guide me to some answers.

Of course, with this month's focus on the ancestry of Theresa Blaising, technically my father-in-law's step-grandmother, there will be no need to search for DNA matches. There will be, however, quite a bit of study in the local history of French settlements in Indiana yet to come this week.