When Genealogy is Like Housecleaning

 

My goal today was to review the public Olejniczak family lines at FamilySearch, comparing that with my own tree at Ancestry.com, to see if the powerful search engine system at that website—to say nothing of the volunteers worldwide who are building their own trees there—has turned up anything new. My hope is that, eventually along the line, someone from a recent generation will connect with a real family member who can claim that entry at FamilySearch as, say, a grandparent. I want to find living people who can explain what happened in those gaping holes in the history of my Polish family.

As I went along the process—systematically, I might add—I began to realize how much genealogy can be like housecleaning. You find something in the living room that really should belong in the bedroom, so you pick it up and bring it to its rightful place, only to discover something in the bedroom that was supposed to be left in the living room. On the return trip, you spot another misplaced item which came from the kitchen. No problem, you think: just drop it off there on your way back to the living room. 

And so on it goes, until suddenly, the entire day is done and the house is still a wreck.

I'm a bit more hopeful for how this project will roll out in the genealogical housekeeping side of life. I am running across entries at FamilySearch which suggest documents I had previously missed. I'm also spotting duplicate entries which come with added bonuses, like a spouse whose marriage record includes the future in-laws' names, as well.

The process does indeed take time. That's the tedium of genealogical housekeeping. But if it leads to information on a next generation, especially family members in the 1900s, that will dovetail nicely with my hope to untangle the mess of Polish DNA matches I have at MyHeritage. I suspect those DNA cousins may lead me somewhere worth my while, but only if I can find the nexus to connect the records I've found from the 1800s with the gaps in my DNA matches' family trees preceding their own, known, more recent relatives.

In the meantime, if it seems I haven't been saying much about this, just know that grunt work is never something scintillating to write home about. Unglamorous as it is, this is exactly the type of work which uncovers those leads which will move the project forward.