A Pause to Count

The last couple months have been rough on genealogical research results. Battling Covid for one month, then dealing with the dismay over access to Polish records this month, admittedly I haven't made much progress. But it's time for that biweekly tally. Regardless of the excuses, it's time to take the pause to count the progress.

In the past two weeks, that Polish challenge has yielded forty one new relatives entered on my family tree. It's been a hard-won minor victory, though truth be told, those were mainly descendants added to the immigrant lines I've already discovered. Some of them were added, thanks to connection to DNA matches I've already known about. But hey, progress is progress. I now have 40,300 people on my side of the family tree.

Granted, the past two weeks included a few days from the previous month's goal, when I was trying to do penance for not finding anything further on those Flannery ancestors back in County Tipperary, Ireland. Mostly, that work was again focused on DNA matches who descend from immigrant Flannery and Tully descendants from my father-in-law's tree. The 139 new individuals added to that tree push the total count for my in-laws' tree to 41,813.

I suspect the next two weeks will progress about as slowly as the results for today's report. I'll be back to that research question about my father's patriline. I'm mostly jumping between my tree, posted on Ancestry.com, and Prussian records digitized at FamilySearch.org, to slowly—painfully slowly—push my way back in time with actual documents. If not for speed in progress, at least it's encouraging to focus on the thoroughness of results. Finding documents for this family's previous generations has been rewarding in its own way.