It's been slow going through these Polish ancestral branches of my father's family tree so far this month, but it's so necessary in order to find the ancestral nexus with my DNA matches. However, while I know that effort means I'm making progress, it always seems to feel more like progress when the ancestral count rises faster.
Take these past two weeks. Back at the beginning, I started with 40,500 documented individuals in my family tree. Bouncing back and forth between Polish records sources and my trees at Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch, finding documents and plugging in the URL for each document in each Polish ancestor's profile page—times three—meant I only found sixty six new identities to add to that tree in that time period.
It seems so slow. But then I keep in mind I'm trailblazing into new territory, both in a country for which I'm unfamiliar with research resources—not to mention the language!—and into generations previously unknown to my own family. I'm drilling down to unfamiliar details, true, but the reward is making new discoveries. In addition to providing me the working diagram to help place those DNA cousins, that advance into previous generations of the family, alone, should seem encouraging.
There are other ways to grow a family tree, of course. As for my in-laws' tree, I shouldn't be working on their side of the family for another five months, but I found myself adding seven new names to that tree this past week. Why? Someone reached out to me online with a question regarding those same family roots.
In order to answer that message, I needed to do some additional research. That, in turn, led to adding more collateral lines to my in-laws' tree. And now, that tree has grown, ever so slightly, to include 41,724 ancestral names. When we connect, we can't help but learn more about our own family, even while we are helping out someone else.
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