Every now and then—especially when I feel like I'm stuck in my research—I like to take stock of progress. Struggling with missing, incomplete, or illegible documentation does slow things down to a crawl, and it helps to have some encouragement to keep going. That is partly the reason for my biweekly counts: not for bragging rights, but for a reminder that, bit by bit, progress does happen if you keep at it.
This time, I was pretty sure the numbers would not look too encouraging. After all, right now I'm trawling through Boston city directories, trying to determine whether I'm searching for the right Patrick Cullinane (I'm concerned I'm not). But progress in the past two weeks has held steady, compared to the previous two weeks when I was wrapping up another hard-to-locate Irish ancestor.
So here's the count: fifty more names added to my father-in-law's branch of the family tree. My in-laws' tree now has 44,368 documented names in total, though it has been growing so slowly this summer while I pursue those hard-to-find Irish forebears.
Though I wish there were more Irish relatives out there to test their DNA, I guess we'll have to wait for one of those seasons best suited to sales. There were absolutely zero new DNA tests linked to my husband's results in the past two weeks. He still has 1,510 DNA matches at the estimated level of fourth cousin or closer, exactly the range I'd need to piece together the story of the many descendants of Johanna Falvey's sister Gobnait and her husband Daniel Cullinane. Thankfully, I've already found a few DNA cousins to help guide this search a bit further, something we'll attend to this coming week.
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