12 For '25

 

We're entering one of my favorite times of year: that quiet lull between Christmas and New Year's Day. This week has always been an introspective time for me, which lends itself well to planning for the upcoming year's family history research projects.

As I've done now for the past five years, I'll be selecting one ancestral line per month for my research focus in 2025, beginning with this quiet week following Christmas—but to cover those twelve ancestors for the upcoming year, I'll extend the process through January 6, Epiphany. Hence, the "twelve days of Christmas" for the twelve ancestors I'll be researching next year, my "Twelve Most Wanted."

What I discovered over this past year is not to give up on those hopeless brick wall ancestors, but to try, try again. I learned this at first when FamilySearch labs released their Full Text Search capabilities, showing me that there might be hope, after all, to find answers—or at least promising leads. I can think of several ancestors where this tool may provide me some fresh answers after struggling for years without any leads. At least two of my stuck research lines may benefit from that, and will be on my Twelve Most Wanted list for this year.

The second lesson I learned this past year is to never assume the search is over based on currently-available records. Not everything is currently online—but more of it might be, given another year's time. Nor has every record ever created been featured in a widely-accessible website. Some websites add new records. Some records pop up on new websites. And some have been there all along, but I hadn't found them before, because they were featured on a website in a language I didn't speak, or from a country whose records I wasn't familiar with.

Remembering this fact of ever-changing availability will keep me from writing off research goals—like assuming, during last year's planning for my Twelve Most Wanted, that my father's Polish heritage would be forever a secret because I couldn't travel to Poland or access any more records there. It will also renew research vigor when I pursue my father-in-law's Irish roots. Who knows what Irish records might be digitized, or even found, by the time I begin work on his branch of the family this coming July? After all, according to Canadian blogger John Reid, there's just been 275 Irish titles added to the FamilySearch Full Text search, good news indeed.

The process for the annual Twelve Most Wanted plan is to select three ancestors from my mother's family lines to research in the first quarter of the year, one ancestor for each month. I'll outline what I need to know on each of these three selected ancestors with one overview post per day this week.

Following those three ancestors from my mother's heritage, the next quarter of the year will be devoted to three selected ancestors from my mother-in-law's family history. Again, I'll explain my goals for each of those ancestors with one post per day.

As we approach the second half of 2025, we'll move on to my father-in-law's Irish roots, the source of several brick wall frustrations. Though I still have my doubts about any forward movement with those projects, I've learned to not box myself in with assumptions that circumstances will remain static in the future. Here's hoping to three more selections which, by the point of this summer, will see fulfillment. 

Closing out the year, the final three ancestors selected will bring me full circle to the mistake I had made last year at this time: assuming that I couldn't make any more progress due to lack of access to records. I have far greater hopes for finding answers with the availability of sources come next October. Again, I'll lay out the details on the final three of my Twelve Most Wanted with a description of those goals, one ancestor per day, to bring us up to Epiphany and the close of my overview of research plans for 2025.

That said, for January, I am looking forward to reaching back to a goal I had set three years ago: finding the parents of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws of Tennessee and possibly North Carolina. I have plenty of DNA matches connecting me to that Laws surname, but so many of those DNA cousins' trees seem to connect with a different ancestral Laws family. Despite working on this problem in February of 2022, I really didn't make any definitive discoveries. With Full Text Search and fresh eyes, I hope to locate records tying Sarah to parents and siblings, from which I can then draw up a descendancy chart and connect the dots with some DNA cousins.

That, however, is only the first of my goals for 2025. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at the possibility for Ancestor #2 of my Twelve Most Wanted for the upcoming year.