Tedious But Necessary

 

There are some aspects of family history research that are, let's say, less than glamorous. No, let's put it more clearly: they are downright tedious. That's the rut I've been stuck in lately.

Now that it's time for my biweekly count, the numbers will be quite telling—but that isn't to say I haven't been researching. On the contrary, I've been scrolling through documentation at multiple websites, seeking  proof of those vital specifics of birth, marriage, and—sometimes far too early—deaths. The documents which confirm that story for my ancestors and their collateral lines are necessary, but finding the documents can be tedious, especially when the repositories which store them can be hard to access.

So, for the past week, and on into the future month, I'll be walking through a process of locating transcriptions of such documents for my Polish ancestors' descendants, then following the links or reference notes to confirm those details with my own eyes—preferably with a copy of the actual digitized document saved to my own computer.

The numbers on my biweekly count tell the story of this process rather starkly. In the past two weeks, while giving up closing out the search for my second great-grandmother Susanna Radomska's line and beginning that same task for second great-grandfather Franciszek Jankowski, I've managed to increase my tree to 42,030 documented individuals. Sound impressive? Not really: that means I only found four new names to add to my family tree in the past two weeks. This process is indeed moving along s-l-o-w-l-y.

With a pace of that speed, it will seemingly take an eternity to catch up with my in-laws' benchmark of 44,402 individuals, which has been holding steady since I wrapped up this year's search for my father-in-law's Irish forebears back in September.

Still, the process is necessary. There is no single place where I can go to both download actual digitized records and display my family tree. Not for Polish ancestry.

I want the online tree. But I also need to support every assertion that appears on that online tree. And those Polish records are not always readily available to descendants like me, whose ancestors left Poland generations ago. But I can't let that deter me. It may be tedious, but it is still necessary to document each assertion in that tree. If it means importing digitized copies of supporting documentation to my family trees, then that's what I'll need to do.