Sometimes, All You Get Is an Initial

 

I may be focusing on my father-in-law's Flanagan family for July, but behind the scenes for the past two weeks, I've still been trying to build out the family tree of Simon Rinehart, last month's research project. Since I had discovered the name of several more of his children, one goal was to build out the family tree so that I'd find hooks to connect with those mystery DNA matches. Such a process can sometimes be tedious, moving from parent to child to grandchild, and on down through multiple additional generations for each line of descent. If you've worked on a family tree, you know the drill.

For some branches of the Rinehart tree, the process these past two weeks went rather smoothly, but for others, it was a difficult slog. Reviewing document after document, there were instances where the effort yielded very few additional details. Sometimes, despite hours of searching, all that is gained might only be the addition of a person's middle initial. Our tiniest battles are often hard won.

Eventually, though, that puny middle initial gets added to another tiny detail, and then another. Over the course of several searches, we see that mystery ancestor's being take shape before us in our database, and the fuller picture allows us to connect the dots on a family's composition, or point us to the answer we didn't even know we were seeking. We are conjuring up ancestors, data point by data point. Eventually, there is enough data dust accumulated for that ancestor to take shape.

I remind myself of this, every time I weary of the routine—that tap dance in front of my computer screen, reviewing census enumeration after enumeration, or digging through wills or juggling sequential tax records, looking for that elusive connection to the others we can family. For every middle initial we do find, the search brings us one step closer to an answer. It's in the incremental advance that we journey towards finding the completed family picture.