Some Goals are Stickier Than Others

 

If a family historian's research goals start with finding the names, dates, and locations of each direct line ancestor, you'd think it would be an across-the-board equal effort for any given relative. But no, as it turns out: some research goals are stickier than others. They contain prickles and barbs and ooey-gooey sticky messes that get us snarled up in the paperwork. They include the lions, tigers, and bears along the research path which make us take wrong turns, run from evidence we can't access, or simply chicken out at the immense effort. And it all comes with no guarantee of success, no matter how hard we work.

Don't say you haven't been forewarned.

Take this past month, for instance. Searching for Theresa Blaising's roots, despite her relatively recent acquaintance with my father-in-law's family during his childhood, required me to slow down and immerse myself in the general history of French immigration to the midwest. I won't say the detour wasn't valuable;  I'm just disappointed I couldn't make more progress in the thirty one days I tackled the topic.

All that to say I wasn't surprised to see my progress in growing my in-laws' family tree was much slower than any usual biweekly period for my customary tally. In the last two weeks, the rate slowed to only 151 new individuals added to that family tree—and most of those additions were due to a secondary, behind-the-scenes goal of continuing to work on some DNA matches for my mother-in-law's Snider and Snyder line. Still, I can't complain: in the aggregate, this step-by-step work over the years has yielded a tree which now stands at 36,660 individuals.

For my own tree, progress has drawn to a standstill, but that is part of the plan. When I outlined my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, I set aside the third quarter of 2024 to devote to my father-in-law's family. We have one more month to focus on that before we return to working on my own family's tree. While my tree has 38,421 documented individuals right now, that number only budges upward during the summer on the rare chances that I stumble across news of an addition to the family, or a loss of an elder. Unless prompted by birth announcements or obituaries, I won't return to that side of the family until October.

Yet September may turn out to be another month with a sticky goal. I have been stuck on the roots of the lines of James and Mary Kelly—from Ireland, of course, during those tragic famine years. If I can't find any further documentation on them, we'll take that detour to examine the more generic overview of the local history and occurrences of that time period, both in Ireland where they once lived, and in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, where they spent their last days after their immigration.