Pruning the Family Tree

This month, I put my mother-in-law's family tree on a diet. Well, more to the point, now that I've regained functionality on my "merge with duplicate" button at Ancestry.com, these past few weeks have left a lot of carnage out in the genealogical ether; I've been vanquishing doubled profiles in her tree, left and right. Since today is the time for my biweekly count, let's see just how many duplicates my mother-in-law's "endogamy lite" family yielded. 

Before the beginning of this project, I had closed out the previous biweekly period with 41,826 individual profiles in my in-laws' tree. My pruning project, over this subsequent two week period, has apparently made a sizable difference: the tree now contains 41,717 relatives. I've ended up with 109 less people than where I started, two weeks ago. I'd say that's a lot of pruning.

This month, I've been focusing on my own father's Polish roots, facing an entirely different research challenge. While most of the time, I'm poring over Catholic Church records from the Prussian villages where my father's paternal grandmother's extended family once lived, I'm also paying keen attention to the DNA matches connected to this line—and to their shared matches, especially those I haven't been able to place in the family tree up to this point.

As I add these matches into my tree, slowly but surely, that branch has been blossoming. Over the past two weeks, that work has yielded 105 new entries. The challenge now, especially for those DNA matches who still live in Poland—or even in nearby European countries—is to find documentation to support their contention that we share these same Puchała, Zegarski, or Wojtaś lines. For the most robust records resource, I've looked mostly to FamilySearch.org, but I'm also thankful for the transcriptions from the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website, which has been providing me with a research roadmap to guide the way to documents.

Granted, in past biweekly periods, I've experienced greater progress than I have this time—not to mention the reversed count for my in-laws' tree!—but the challenges of this month's research goal require a slower and more careful pace. Given that the Polish roots of my father's family will be my research focus through the end of this year, I anticipate a more sedate report for the next three biweekly periods as well, before we close out this year and move on to next year's Twelve Most Wanted.