When the To-Do List Piles Up

It seemed like a reasonable plan: I'd limit myself to researching one ancestor per month. That way, I could focus on one specific research question, having the luxury of at least thirty days to struggle from unsolved mystery to documented answer.

You know that plan never quite works out in just the right amount of time.

Despite the best of intentions, at the end of each month, that almost-in-reach answer taunted me so much that I made an exception. I promised I'd keep on the trail of that ancestral quest—only I'd do it behind the scenes, not including it here in what has become my genealogical journal of research progress. In other words, those monthly research leftovers found themselves added to my to-do list. And that research to-do list has piled up to an unmanageable level.

Today, I thought I'd brace myself and take a tally of all the tabs on my computer marking tasks yet awaiting completion. Reaching back to January, there's the question about my fifth great-grandfather John Carter: did he have two wives or three? And which of his children belonged to which mother? Could we devise a DNA project to resolve that mystery?

Piled up with that Carter question, I had promises made to myself from previous years to continue my search for all Broyles descendants from the second Germanna settlement, since I've since met several distant Broyles cousins both online and in real life. "Are you my cousin?" became an oft-repeated question this year, and I simply needed to find a way to answer that. Hence, a research project behind the scenes which has stretched well over a year now.

A DNA match mess over genetic cousins from my maternal grandfather's Laws family—which I haven't written about in years—has kept me playing "what if" games with data from those matches off and on. I need to approach the "off" side of that equation soon. Perhaps this needs to be a Twelve Most Wanted target for next year—for once and for all.

On my mother-in-law's side of the family, several projects await my attention. It seems each time I work on one of her ancestors, a multitude of DNA matches appear in my husband's accounts and call me to add dozens of collateral lines to her tree. I've got tabs open on my laptop to keep me working on her Snider, Metzger, Ijams, Howard, Flowers, and Gordon lines.

And oh, now that I think of it, even last month closed out without my escaping those lingering to-do wishes. After piecing together James and Mary Kelly's story from my father-in-law's family in every which way I could, I tried tracing all their known descendants. I am not done with that process. Add yet another task to the ever-growing to-do list.

Perhaps it will be time to play catch-up. Or harvest all these notes to help in creating my Twelve Most Wanted projects for 2025. I'd say there are enough of them to last me another year. And then some.