It is likely just as true for genealogy as for any other endeavor: you can get more accomplished if you set research goals for yourself. The caveat, of course, is that you actually do the work you've set out for yourself.
In the case of my process of selecting my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors to research for the year, each monthly focus has sub-categories. One of those categories is to review, update, and catalogue my DNA matches for that specific ancestor. This may all seem elementary and routine—after all, you can't accomplish a goal without tackling it step by step—but there is another component I've lately discovered is also needed in this process: fortitude.
Take this month's research focus: my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider. While a second great-grandfather may not seem that far removed from our own generation—I actually know some people who have lived to see their own second great-grandchildren—in my mother-in-law's case, her family's generations were long. By that, I mean there was a lot of time elapsed between generations, especially when it came to those Catholic families with many children. A youngest child of a youngest child could mean generations that were separated by forty years or more.
Bottom line for all that: Nicholas Snider had a lot of descendants to trace. And there were quite a few of them in the past decade who have become fascinated with DNA testing. To put some numbers on this detail, my DNA test for this line—provided courtesy of my husband for his mother—currently has 261 matches tied to Nicholas Snider's line.
Let's step back to that research goal for this month: Nicholas Snider. If part of that goal is to verify all those DNA matches, I've got a lot of work ahead of me. Granted, part of the step-by-step process for the past ten years has been to research each of the descendants of this ancestral founding immigrant, Nicholas Snider. There are a lot of names—plus documentation to verify—already in place in my mother-in-law's tree, thanks to that decade-long, step by step process. But that is just the foundational work. Next is the process of going through each match listed on Thru-Lines (for those Ancestry DNA matches), to verify their connection to this most recent common ancestor.
My genealogy happy dance for this weekend is that I completed the review of all DNA matches who link to Nicholas' eldest son, Jacob. When I started this project at the beginning of April, that meant reviewing eighty DNA matches—but something happened along the way: the number of DNA matches inexplicably reduced by one, then by another, leaving the count for my task now at seventy eight matches to verify.
Still, that's seventy eight people with records to verify. Yet, step by step, I got through the process. True, there were five I simply couldn't verify. That may be due to insufficient access to records—some states' records are more available online than others—but it could also be owing to mistakes in the match's own tree. I did spot a couple matches for whom documentation didn't seem to support the trees from which ThruLines draws its information.
One helpful tactic I tried this month was to start work on this DNA match list from the bottom rather than from the top. I had always done so from the top in the past, but I was concerned that I would run out of steam before finishing—and besides, I would simply be repeating the process if I started from the top once again. So I reversed engines and headed to the bottom of the pile this time.
Another approach was to keep a separate list of each match I completed, to ensure I hadn't skipped any—and, as I realized was also important, to note each "match" for whom I couldn't supply documentation or find verifiable connections.
Once at the top of the list, having completed the process for each descendant of Jacob Snider, it was time to move on to the next son of Nicholas Snider—but which one? I toyed with the idea of moving to the next largest grouping—that would be the descendants of Simon Snider, for whom I'll need to tackle sixty DNA matches—but decided on a different approach. Rather than jump around on the readout—not to mention, deal with another daunting number—I opted to simply go down the list as it was provided by ThruLines.
With that, my next grouping to work on is the twenty eight DNA matches linked to Nicholas' son Lewis. Twenty eight seems like such a breeze after eighty, giving me a psychological lift from the grind of the last series. But strangely enough, working on this different set of descendants brings its own "flavor." I've already spotted two ThruLines charts which simply can't be possible. One was a case of confusing two different men with the same first name but differing middle names; the other will require building out the proposed match's own tree, as ThruLines connected that tree with an ancestral woman for whom I can find no marriage record.
Despite the different problems I'm encountering with this second ancestral line, I've already completed eight of the twenty eight listed DNA matches for Lewis Snider's line. And the next son of Nicholas after that will be Aloysius Joseph Snider, who represents only four DNA matches. Each segment completed brings me step by step closer to finishing this research goal. Though I had my doubts at the beginning of the month that I would completely tackle this pile of 261 DNA matches, getting over that first hurdle of nearly eighty matches was certainly an encouragement.
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