Putting the Brakes on

 

Some quests for mystery ancestors produce lots of leads or round up unexpected relatives. Not so this month. For the last two weeks, especially, progress has been slow as I pursued possible connections that turned out to be, well, bum leads. With only one more day left to this month's chase, it's time to put the brakes on and slow down enough to park this family history vehicle.

The goal this month was to identify the parents of my second great-grandfather, Virginia-born Alexander Boothe. Unlike past projects where I felt confident in adding tentative family connections with a "hypothesis" tag or bright yellow warning sign, the leads I followed for the Boothe family didn't inspire even that much confidence—not even the DNA matches.

Perhaps that repeated experience of viewing—then rejecting—possible relatives was what caused my biweekly count to tank. I did manage to add ninety six relatives to my family tree with confidence, but mainly those were members of the Boothe family whom I already knew were descendants of Alexander, not any newly-discovered siblings or parents. My tree is still quite full and "bushy" at 40,206 researched relatives, but I certainly would have welcomed more, if I could just crack the code to solve this mystery family connection. (I have some observations to make tomorrow, but the bottom line is: no solid answer yet.)

As far as my in-laws' family tree goes, I haven't made one bit of progress on their side of the family for this entire first quarter of 2025, with the exception of some family news received over the winter holidays which tempted me to do some searching early in January.

That static situation will change with the flip of the calendar page from March to April, when I leave my Twelve Most Wanted goals for my mother's side of the family, and venture into the to-do list for my mother-in-law's relatives next. With that fresh start in April, we'll be working on a tree which now has 37,367 researched individuals to see if we can push beyond the brick wall on my mother-in-law's Schneider/Snider/Snyder line before the family's arrival in Ohio in the 1800s.