Having a research goal is good policy; focusing on one specific detail hones attention. Having multiple projects in the air all at once is good juggling practice, but it doesn't always yield the results we were hoping for. So far this month, mixing research goals has produced mixed results. And for those results, my biweekly count only reveals part of the picture.
In the past two weeks, I've mostly been focusing on my March research project: discovering the parents of my third great-grandfather, Thomas F. Rainey. Looking at this latest count, I can see I did make progress: I added eighty two additional names to my family tree. Mostly, these were collateral lines gleaned from names mentioned in court records, with their descendants also connected to the picture.
Included in that effort was a review of DNA matches uncovered either by the ThruLines tool at Ancestry.com or the ProTools option to view Shared Matches. But I also got a bit off the selected path for this month's Twelve Most Wanted, thanks to the unexpected revelation of an adoptee who turned out to be a close relative, a most welcome addition to that same family tree, which now has grown to 41,804 documented relatives.
That, however, wasn't the full tale of this multiple-goal fortnight. A welcome email from my husband's niece started me down a different family path, building out a branch on her father's tree which resulted in forty more names on my in-laws' tree. So that count gets upped to 41,793—a tree which will see regular growth come next month, when I shift my focus to my mother-in-law's branches of that tree.
Granted, trawling through pages upon pages of court-recorded family disputes can slow down progress with my count—but gives a clearer picture of family dynamics, for sure. That will be the path for next week's research on the Rainey family and related branches, and those endless pages of court records as we sort through the remains of Isham Rainey's estate in Mississippi.
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