Putting the Brakes on

  

Apparently, some research projects put the brakes on progress far more than other projects. For this past month's Twelve Most Wanted project—finding the ancestral home of Irish immigrants James and Mary Kelly—progress on building my father-in-law's family tree came to an abrupt halt. Sure, I looked all over the web for a variety of online resources in search of the answer, but found very little. In the meantime, that task gobbled up the time I would otherwise have invested in building out his tree.

It is no surprise, then, to learn that I was only able to add forty eight additional relatives to my in-laws' tree in the past two weeks. That number hasn't been so low for my biweekly tallies since the beginning of this year, when I was focused on my own mother's tree. It's actually a rare fortnight that has seen any results dipping below one hundred for the time period. Still, my in-laws' tree has 36,799 documented individuals included, which is the culmination of a multi-year project in its own right.

It won't be long, though, and we'll be moving on to another research project with the coming of a new month, this time shifting our focus to my own father's side of the family tree. Before I do that, though, I'll have some concluding observations to share tomorrow about that last minute research approach I decided to try just the other day. Talk about last minute inspiration....