Gone to “Colorada”

Members of his second family have always been interested in his first family. We have wondered why none of them came to be with the Colonel.

Descendants of Charles Edward Broyles’ second family in Colorado may have expressed puzzlement in mentioning “why none of them came to be with the Colonel,” as one post to a genealogy forum revealed nearly fifteen years ago.

That, however, may not have been how the original scenario unfolded.

Not long after Charles abruptly left his home and family in Dalton, Georgia—on March 22, 1875, by his own reckoning in his journal—a brief item appeared in The Daily Constitution, an Atlanta newspaper. Dated April 13, 1876—barely a year after Charles left Georgia—the page four column labeled “Summary of State News” had this to say from Dalton:

C. E. Broyles, jr., has left for Colorada…

That “C. E.,” incidentally, would be Charles Edward Broyles’ first son by that name—the one born in 1850 to Charles’ first wife, Lucy. That would also likely have been one of the sons whom Charles had complained about going “back to railroading” when he had tried to set them up in business. Perhaps this son’s railroad work was the very vehicle enabling him to travel out west to visit his father, now so far away in Colorado.

While the younger Charles eventually returned to Georgia—he was back in Dalton by the time of the 1880 census—it appears he was not the only one of his siblings to head west to visit his dad. Missing from that same 1880 census in Georgia was the elder Charles’ second son, Joseph Frank Broyles. Whether his sole purpose in heading to Colorado was to visit his father, “J. Frank” stayed in Colorado long enough to meet and marry Eleanora Kennern in 1883. By the time of the 1900 census, Frank and his wife were settled in Scofield, Utah, where he continued to work for the railroad as a locomotive engineer.

Whether the other sons—Robert, Price, or John—left Georgia to go see their father in Colorado is difficult to determine from census records alone. It will take some closer examination of their life stories to check for that, which we’ll begin to take up tomorrow. Still, to say that no one followed the elder Charles Broyles westward, or ever saw him again, is an inaccurate representation. Whether to visit briefly in the western state or to choose to stay in the region for a lifetime, at least two of Charles’ children from his first marriage made the attempt to reconnect with their father within the first few years after he left home.

 Above: 1849 watercolor, "The Night Train," by British landscape painter, David Cox; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

A Legacy of Two Families

And at this writing the fruits [of] the marriage are two smart promising boys.

One has to wonder about the legacy left by someone like Charles Edward Broyles. I’m not thinking of his Civil War involvement, or even the track record of his lengthy career in law and public service. I’m referring to the heritage he passed down to each of two entirely separate families—the one he left behind in Georgia, and the one he raised up in his new life in Colorado.

It was a plaintive comment found in a genealogy forum that gave me pause to consider. A descendant—apparently from the second family—noted,

Members of his second family have always been interested in his first family. We have wondered why none of them came to be with the Colonel.

When Charles E. Broyles wrote his brief journal, he had dated the last segment as September 11, 1887. At that point, according to his comment, he and his second wife, Nellie, had two sons. By the time of the 1900 census—which turned out to be six years shy of Charles’ own passing—the couple had six children listed, including one four month old son who had yet to be named.

That 1900 census, though, also revealed that Nellie had been mother of eight children in total. Likely, of the two sons Charles had referred to in his memoirs, one of them was Nellie’s first born, Prentis Bay Broyles. Born February 6, 1885, the child lived only seven years, dying in September of 1892.

Another child—one of only two daughters born to this couple—also died young. Ruby Broyles, born January 18, 1891, died as an infant only eight days later. (It’s a haunting experience for me to read that name, for at the other end of that same decades, Charles’ niece Sarah Broyles McClellan gave her own daughter—my grandmother—that same name: Rubie Broyles McClellan. Could she have known about her estranged uncle’s loss only a few years prior?)

But what of the rest of the children—the ones who survived to adulthood? Who were they, and how did they fare?

The second of those “smart promising boys” was likely Taliaferro Brooks Broyles. Born in 1887, Taliaferro—who evidently caved and forsook the written form of its spelling for its phonetic rendering, Virginia-style, and signed his name as “Toliver”—spent his life as a farmer in the same county in which he was born. He and his wife, the former Minnie Hartley, raised eight children of their own.

Many of the rest of this Broyles family followed suit—working in the same county in which they were born, many earning their living in agriculture. The Find A Grave entries for Conejos County, Colorado, reveal a host of Broyles descendants who spent an entire lifetime in the same place Charles adopted as his new hometown.

Charles and Nellie’s third child presented me with a puzzle. Choosing to name this son after the father—Charles Edward Broyles—created the awkward situation of the father having a son from each of his two marriages given the exact same name. The son Charles from the second marriage—who also spent his adult years in the same county in which he was born, working in livestock and “managing” sheep—likewise chose to call his own son that very same name. Years later, that son, also a lifelong resident of Conejos County, Colorado, chose to name his son Charles Edward Broyles, as well.

No matter how intriguing the rest of the names bestowed upon Charles’ second family—including Flavius Onderdonk Broyles, who understandably chose to go with “Fla” as his nickname—my mind was arrested, once I encountered this obvious duplication.

I couldn’t help wonder what the first son Charles Edward Broyles was thinking about his father, once he discovered this fact. Yes, the litany of names did continue with the more neutral choices of John Aaron for the next son, and a predictable Nellie for the only surviving daughter. But even the last choice of names—for that son who had been left unnamed for four months leading up to the 1900 census—made me wonder: Dryden Johnson Broyles. I can guess that Onderdonk might have come from Charles’ second wife’s side of the family. But Johnson? That was first wife Lucy’s maiden name. And even that plain choice of John Aaron uncomfortably echoed the John A. Broyles left behind as youngest son to Charles and Lucy.

Seeing all these names echoed from first family to second one, I couldn’t help recalling Charles’ own enigmatic comment:

And now four boys and two girls are left in Georgia as the fruit of our marriage. I am ashamed of none of them, yet might have been made to feel prouder.

What was the legacy left behind for that first family?

Making a Property

When it comes to looking closely at ancestors’ personal stories, some may be quite ordinary, while others never cease to amaze. As for Charles Edward Broyles, my second-great grandfather’s older brother, I think we can safely conclude that his was a story bordering on the amazing. From his early success at his study of law, his unexpected success in agriculture, his prowess in local government, and certainly his escapades during the Civil War all contribute to a full life.

That, however, was only the first part of his life’s story for, as we’ve already discovered, it was as if the man led two lives: one with his seemingly perfect wife, Lucy Ann Johnson Broyles, and the other after his abrupt exit from his hometown of Dalton, Georgia, in 1875.

When Charles arrived in Colorado—his destination after concluding he was no longer welcome in Dalton—he found a new life as attorney and registrar for the Del Norte agency of the General Land Office. After his wife’s passing, we see he also found a new love in the person of Nellie Armstrong, the frontier town’s young schoolteacher. Charles happened to be thirty five years her senior—not to mention, already the father of five children older than she—but that did not keep them from marrying on May 7, 1884.

According to a brief journal that Charles left—during an episode in which he thought he was about to lose his own life—he apparently knew what he was after, in terms of land and fortune, when he settled in the southern portion of the newly established state of Colorado. He mentioned trying his hand at mining—unsuccessfully—and then investing in the prospecting of others. But the one thing he seemed focused on the most was the acquisition of land:

            I was anxious to make a property before going back…

Back in Georgia, Charles likely had originally been owner of a large property. As I’ve studied references to the man, I’ve seen mentions of the “plantation” he lost, either during or just after the Civil War. Perhaps he wanted to somehow regain those glory days, and acquiring land—no matter how arid or God-forsaken it might have appeared—was the way he was going to do it.

Though Charles settled on the edge of civilization in his new start in life, he apparently found the hub where the land trading was happening. While I can find evidence that Charles obtained a homestead of his own in Conejos County, Colorado—pursuant to the Homestead Act of 1862—I’ve also found, through statements by his descendants, that he, himself, served as registrar for the Del Norte land office, the very place where he had secured his own property claim.

That position, however, apparently did not come without its own risks—at least, if we are to believe the scenario portrayed in Charles’ journal. Before we revisit that section of his brief memoirs, though, we’ll need to take a look at the family that was raised up to call him “Father” in this new hometown in Colorado.

Above: An 1898 photochrom print of the Sangre de Cristo Range at Poncha Pass, by the Detroit Photographic Company, provides an idea of the landscape viewed in the area in which Charles Edward Broyles settled in Colorado; courtesy United States Library of Congress via Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Of Maintenance Records and Recent Marriages

Why is it the littlest clue can provide the biggest picture, when it comes to telling the stories of our ancestors?

This past week—well, at least the part between Christmas and New Year’s Day—was supposed to be that quiet respite when I set aside all other assignments and just focused on the housekeeping aspect of setting up for the oncoming year. I did do that, to a certain extent. But even extending that time through the New Year’s weekend didn’t seem to provide enough time, this year.

Yes, I promise I’ll return on Monday to our story of Charles Edward Broyles and his escapades in Colorado, so far from what used to be his home. On the eve of that planned return to our regular schedule, though, I’m realizing just how much annual maintenance a life can require.

An unexpected thing started happening this week, when I took my recent DNA testing task seriously: I ended up staring at the details of some of our family's most long-standing genealogies—at least, here in this country. And that reminded me how long it’s been since I last worked on, for instance, my mother-in-law’s Flowers line—in this country since the mid 1700s. Or my own Broyles line, stretching back at least as far. I know I have several other lines—there’s that collateral instance popping up again, just as Amy Johnson Crow is suggesting—that, if I devoted some serious attention to them, would also lead me back to the 1700s here, if not to the 1600s as well.

That’s just the work that’s yet to be done. What about the work that needs a regular check-up? After all, it doesn’t hurt to go back and review our research—especially if we’ve been at it for any length of time.

Friday night, thanks to reviewing a match on my husband’s DNA test, I found myself working on a collateral line to his Flowers family—Ambrose—and realized it had been at least fifteen years since I last worked on that line. It’s high time to revisit that work and see what else can be added. And likely corrected, as well!

So, how does one insure that no surname is left behind in a review of past research? Develop a maintenance schedule? After all, if we calendar in our car’s oil changes or home furnace inspections, wouldn’t it make sense to schedule a sweep through the major surnames in our family trees?

I’m not that organized, though. I’m more likely to handle tasks on a need-to-know basis. Like: plan a trip to Ireland, review all the Irish ancestors in the genealogy database. That, however, means that if my pragmatic programming calls for a sweep through all my DNA test result matches, I’ve got a lot of reviewing in my not-too-distant future for a substantial number of family lines.

The one trouble with looking through all that long-forgotten data is that ancestors from so long ago seem to be not much more than names, dates and places. They show up on paper like shadowy figures. Unless you run across a particularly emphatic entry like this line from the 1855 will of John Henry Flowers in Perry County, Ohio—“It is my will that my daughter Barbara Slevins heirs is to have nothing”—there isn’t much of a clue for a researcher to extrapolate the true essence of an ancestor’s day-to-day life.

Of course, you know life back then couldn’t be that different than life today. Even if all the census record said for an ancestor was that he was a farmer, you know life held more than the daily drudgery of routine for even the plodding farmer. There had to be instances of difficulties, arguments, grudges, hurt feelings, miffed sensibilities, unfulfilled expectations in even the life of a nineteenth century farmer.

But how are we to know what those were? Especially if no one has bothered to tell us. We can only extrapolate from what we know about life today—admittedly, a vastly different lifestyle than back then in the 1850s—and blend that with those little comments we do find that make us perk up, pay attention and ask questions. Like, “Why did her heirs receive nothing?”

Yesterday, my husband and I attended a wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony, of course. But what justice would I do it to tell you how gorgeous the bride’s gown was, or what was served for dinner, or how cleverly the decorations were arranged? Even though, yes, if any details are passed down from one generation to the next, it would likely include a list of such descriptions.

What I’d want to know the most, though, is likely the exact essence that infused this wedding ceremony with so much meaning. This was the marriage of a woman whom we watched grow up. A friend of our daughter, she has been a part of our lives for almost the entirety of her own. We know her parents well—and, in fact, her extended family.

To say that I could almost hear, from across the room, the quivering of the lip as her dad gave his heartfelt toast to the new couple is to capture that essence I’m after, when I seek stories of our ancestors. It’s the context that bestows that meaning—knowing all the hopes, fears, struggles, victories a person has gone through, just to lead him or her up to this point. When it comes to exploring just what type of person our ancestors were, it’s details like this which allow those historic figures to step out from behind the mask of their vital statistics and become the living, breathing people they once were.

While going back and reviewing the statistics of long-forgotten ancestors’ database entries is necessary, you can be sure this routine maintenance procedure will only serve as prelude to a fuller exploration of the big picture of who these people once were. After all, names, dates and places can’t very well tell a story. But details can.

Five Afterthoughts on DNA Testing

So, you missed the latest sale for DNA testing? Don’t despair. Here are a few thoughts to review—and, if you’re keen on being prepared, to get done before the next sale descends upon us.

One thing you probably have realized, if you’ve followed along here at A Family Tapestry for any amount of time, is that I haven’t missed that DNA sale. In fact, I had a specific reason for catching this last round of sales: I now have a mystery cousin, adopted, who was delivered to my digital doorstep by this very method (the mother’s line mtDNA test), and with whom we hope to discover a closer connection via autosomal DNA testing.

Now that I’m mulling over the nearly seven hundred matches I’ve received from this most recent test, I’m discovering a few pointers. Not that I’m a keen observer of the obvious or anything. It’s just that reconciling the multiple surnames of seven hundred other genealogy enthusiasts with my own database of fourteen thousand individuals can do that to a person.

In less than a month of data sifting, here’s what I’ve decided.

It’s the work that comes afterwards that makes the test worth the price.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the type who feels the need to study a thing to death. Then I take Step One. Don’t do this. When it comes to doing the DNA test, jump in, feet first. You will learn as you go. The worst thing you can do is take the test, get the results, and then just sit on them. (Actually, I’d say that’s worse than not taking the test at all.)

I started off, in this DNA testing world, using the Y-DNA test for both my brother and my husband. For each one, I was hoping to discover what had been eluding me about their respective paternal lines. While the results are intriguing, they didn’t bring me any closer to my genealogical goals. I found using the autosomal test to be better aligned with my genealogical goals, and I’d strongly recommend you start at that point as well, if you are seeking a method to confirm your family history research.

That said, let me warn you: there is work involved in receiving DNA test results. The “results” are not the answer. They are only the key. If you want to know anything more than the vague “Where My People Come From” readout that gets included with DNA test results, you will need to have your family charts in hand, and your email fired up and ready to roll. You’ll find yourself sifting through endless lists of other people’s genealogy, looking for that needle in the haystack of humanity that makes you and your “match” relatives. You may be asked to confirm proposed results with the company from whom you purchased your DNA test. That will entail reaching out and comparing notes with other researchers. You will also need to be prepared to give to others what you are asking them to reveal to you: as complete an ancestral chart, GEDCOM or surname listing as you can provide, to help others determine whether they have a match with you.

Bottom line: if you are not willing or able to pay the “price” of the work, it certainly will not be worth the cost of any DNA test—even at the sale price.

If you don’t do the work yourself, no one else is likely to do it for you.

Genealogists must all be very nice people. At least they are polite—demurely waiting on the sidelines, just hoping some dashing leader will come along and sweep them off their feet with an invitation to do the Relative Rumba. Don’t wait. Take the lead and make the contacts with your prospective matches. Be the one who reaches out.

Of course, there are those lucky participants who have a Fairy Godmother, ready to wave a wand and get all that grunt work done for them. Those Fairy Godmothers are called professional genealogists. Sometimes, it is they—or, at the least, a “proxy” or results administrator—who will oversee the exchanges with prospective matches. If you don’t have one of those, you are the one who will need to attend to all the details of making connections with your matches.

Be prepared to make a lot of email contacts with people you never heard of before. Those people are your prospective cousins. Yeah, they may turn out to be seventh cousins, twice removed, but hey—they’re the family you paid those big bucks to find, right? Some of those connections may help you break through intractable research brick walls. But you’ll never know until you take the initiative and connect with those strangers on your match list.

Take those relationship ranges with a supersized grain of salt.

Family Tree DNA likes to offer its customers a suggested range of relationships. “Suggested” is my euphemism for their disclaimer, “your actual relationship is highly likely to fall within these…limits.”

What I actually discovered is that some of those ranges are more hopeful than pragmatic. I don’t know; perhaps it is the result of coming from a small family, none of which has jumped on the DNA testing bandwagon unbidden. Besides my own brother, whom I cajoled into doing the Y-DNA test because he is our father’s sole surviving male descendant, I show no first or second cousins in my test results. Mostly, that “second to fourth cousin” category leans heavy on the fourth cousin.

Fifth or sixth cousins? Oh, yeah. I’ve got plenty of those. But do you realize what finding connections with a fifth cousin—or sixth cousin, or beyond—entails? Think about it. I have. Like, seven hundred times I’ve thought about it.

Realize the impact of those numbers you’re seeking.

Entering the DNA testing arena with the starry-eyed notion of finding one’s roots makes great advertising copy. But when it comes right down to it, relationships are translated into numbers. Like, “sixth cousin.”

Have you ever given any thought to what it takes, research-wise, to come up with documentation to secure that rank of sixth cousin? If you don’t have a genealogy database complete to seven generations of your ancestry, you will not be equipped to determine if anyone is your sixth cousin.

Worse than that, if you don’t have the slots filled in on all those fifth-great-grandparents, how will you be equipped to determine whether your “match” really matches you? In case you’re wondering, that would be the names, dates and places of the vital statistics for sixty four individuals you could potentially have in common with your match (assuming your match is either from your paternal side or your maternal side), just at the level of fifth-great-grandparents. If you’re not quite prepared to rattle off those details just now, that’s what you need to focus on while you’re awaiting the next DNA test sale.

Connections come in all shapes and sizes.

Sure, filling in those sixty four slots will give you a listing of all your fifth great grandparents which could potentially be held in common with your match. But only after you added all thirty two of your fourth great grandparents. And your sixteen third great grandparents. You do, incidentally, already have the complete picture for your second and first great grandparents, too, don’t you? That’s another twelve people.

And that’s only presuming you and your match come from that one side of the family. What if the connection is from the other side? Make all those numbers times two: you will get DNA matches for both the paternal and maternal sides of your family.

Getting that completed will give you a nice ancestral chart to work with, once you start pondering those multiplied DNA matches. But that won’t be all you’ll need.

Doing this DNA dance has made me grateful that, a long time ago, I decided I would not only research my direct line of ancestors, but include the data on all their siblings, up each generation—and as many of their descendants as I could find. Not only does that sound unwieldy—believe me, it is—but I sure took the heat for that plan several times over during the decades I’ve been doing this.

Now, though, it is paying off. Collateral, as Amy Johnson Crow likes to call it. The details on all the siblings of your multiplied great-grandparents. The kind of relationships that yields you, ultimately, your sixth cousins. You know: the ones you’re trying to match up with, now.

Believe me, in this quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s Day when I wanted to huddle in a quiet corner and get all my ducks in a row for the upcoming year’s research, what I’ve actually done was spend some time each day, ferreting out possible matches—not only for my own DNA test results, but as administrator for both my husband’s and my brother’s matches. When I’ve taken the time to scour a match’s surname readout—or, better yet, his or her family’s GEDCOM—I find I have better results when I match someone whose family line is an old, well-established line settled in this country since the 1700s or earlier. Why? It’s those Broyles and Taliaferro lines that are so well documented that I can snag their descendants’ surnames as well. Yeah, that’s why I have upwards of fourteen thousand individuals in my database. But it doesn’t bog me down now. It’s handy to be able to put my finger on a match’s surnames and know they are part of these long-standing lines.

I’ve said all that to make one point: if you are thinking about doing your DNA testing, while you are waiting for the next big sale, do yourself a favor and work on these things. Push your ancestral chart back as many generations as possible. Fill in the blanks for all the missing “greats” in your lines. Consider adding information on all the siblings of your direct ancestors, including married names for the women. And see if you can bring those siblings’ lines forward a generation or two.

Your DNA matches will come in all shapes and sizes. They will come hidden in surname labels you don’t recognize. They will come with incomplete documentation that doesn’t quite reach back as many generations as you need to make that distant connection—and sometimes you will have to fill in the blanks for others as well as for your own data.

The more you get your own paperwork in order, the more help you can be to your fellow DNA seekers. And, once you make the big decision to spring for it, the more value you will get out of the DNA testing process.

Telling the Story

If you were to take everything that is important in my life and, metaphorically, toss it into a pot and boil it down, the resultant essence would be: the value of Story. For some reason, I've been feeding on that thought lately. It's that idea which has been resonating through everything I did yesterday, on that first day of the new year. Let me see if I can reconstruct that smörgåsbord for you.

At our house, we launched that first day of 2015 as easily as possible. While we didn’t close out the old year with any of the traditional season’s reveling, it was still nice to sleep in. After all, we have a college student who, having just returned from Ireland, is still trying to catch up on sleep—and an extra eight hours of time zone lacking from her accustomed norm.

So, what does one do when the first meal of the day is too late for breakfast, but too early for lunch? Head to a favorite restaurant for a holiday brunch.

Over a leisurely meal, conversation ebbed and flowed. The stories only gradually made their appearance—as if by osmosis, they would fill the void to achieve equilibrium between teller and audience. While others may chat about the latest episode on their favorite sitcom or soap opera—or even critique what they had to drink at their latest party—our mealtime conversations seldom go in those directions. There are simply too many thoughts to discuss. Ideas to explore. And, of course, there are the stories.

Stories are funny things. Some are audacious. Some are flamboyant. Others are demure, or need just the right setting to seep out. Some are meant to be nibbled. Or sipped. Or relished after properly cleansing the palate from all other disturbances.

As storytelling goes, if it were up to my side of the family, we’d get together in a big huddle and, splat, out would come the stories. The full everything. We’d talk and talk until we were all talked out. And then there would be no words left.

That’s not how my husband does it. A story is a centerpiece in some ways. But it doesn’t always make an immediate appearance. If I were to go somewhere exciting and upon my return, you were to ask me, “So, how did it go?” I would immediately begin to tell you the whole tale. If, on the other hand, it were my husband who had that experience, I know that I would not hear the entire tale in one sitting. It might take days before every story emerged from his memory and received its proper presentation.

When it comes to sharing stories, my daughter is quite like that. The stories have to take time to emerge. And as yesterday’s episode of the recounting unfolded—well over a week after her return home—I couldn’t help but think, “Who else has conversations like these?” If I could have eavesdropped at each table in that restaurant, I doubt any would have displayed as eclectic a source of conversation starters as did our own.

That, of course, does the worried mother no good. I wonder how this child of the next generation will find others with such tendencies in common—friends—but then, I remember she is a child of this next generation, and (seemingly) surgically implanted upon these strange new creatures is one or another device of a social media kind, enabling them to connect and share their own stories. Those of like minds are better equipped now to find each other than we ever were in our heyday.

Despite the generational discrepancy, you and I in the genea-blogging world are no different, though we may tend to speak face to face with more frequency than those of the newly-minted generations. Take our blogs, for instance: places where you and I share our stories of family, and our families’ nexus with history. We inspire and encourage each other with our stories. I loved reading bloggers’ year-in-review posts—like Dara’s at Black Raven Genealogy—where researchers reminded themselves that yes, it was a productive year, after all. Once again, it was the stories that prompted us to remember, “Oh, yeah, that happened.”

Some bloggers—and, granted, not all of them are genealogy bloggers, per se—zoomed in on the aspect of Story, itself. I appreciate what computer geek John Saddington—a post-per-day blogger now for fourteen years straight—felt most keenly about emphasizing: tell the Story.

“The Story” is happening all around us, all the time. It is there for the asking, but we have to capture it to preserve it. Otherwise, it vanishes as soon as our memories let it go. If we deem it to be important, we are the ones that bestow that importance upon a story. Otherwise, if it is forgotten, of what use is a story?

Story is the detail captured while Life is happening. It’s the crestfallen look that flashes across the face of a friend when someone comments that he hasn’t been looking his normal self lately—while the cancer-discovery back story provides the explanation, it’s that visceral signal that, in a split second, drives the message home. Story is what helps us wrap our minds around history. It infuses fervency into fact. It has the staying power that enables us to remember what's been happening.

And remembering is the key. If we don’t have Story to pass down to the next generation, with what tools will they preserve their heritage?

Perhaps that is why some are so insistent on emphasizing the importance of Story. Story is our connection between the past and the future. It’s our vehicle to capture those fleeting tokens of where life is headed—right now—and preserve them in a form that will still be viable in years to come.

The most important thing to remember about Story is that everyone has one. Everyone has a Story. But not everyone will tell that Story. Don’t be that someone.

Tell yours.

 Above: "Schreibender Knabe mit Schwesterchen" ("Boy Writing, With Sister"), 1875 oil on canvas by Swiss artist Albrecht Samuel Anker; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

2015: Year of the Inch

The sheer numbers of genealogy are catching up with me. Everyone knows how those geometric progressions go. It’s that old give-a-child-a-penny-allowance gimmick: the only catch is, each day that allowance gets doubled.

So it is with the budding genealogist: first it’s researching the parents. Then grandparents. Then all the great-grandparents. We progress from two to four to eight to…ten kazillion. Keeping track doesn’t get any easier—even with database management tools.

That same arithmetic apparently applies to DNA testing. That result I just got back? Oh, it’s only in the range of second to fourth cousin. Maybe fifth cousin. But after it’s all over, I suddenly have enough matches to fill up sixty nine pages of results. At ten matches per page, that adds up to a lot of relatives.

Taking the test was the easy part. It’s following up on all the results that presents the challenge. But the value of the test is in the results, so if I don’t follow up, no value to me.

And so begins the tough slog towards finding out the real information I seek. Email after email, attempting to connect, discuss family trees, evaluate hypotheses. Cajoling reticent participants. Following through with requested replies. It all takes time.

The enormity of it all—and this is only one of many tasks in genealogical research—serves to remind me that any task can be conquered, if it is approached in a systematic and regular manner. As has so often been said,

            Inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.

I have a strong feeling that saying is going to become my mantra this year. If I’m to accomplish anything in this research—at least in the spot where I currently am—it will have to be through a strategy of small doses on a regular basis.

How about you? What do you see the year of 2015 bringing you? I hope you have some prospective tasks that get you fired up over possibilities. Whether they present infinitesimal or gargantuan challenges, I wish you the best, in this bright new year, in determining the right approach to conquering your mountain.

 Above: Franz Roubaud, Count Argutinsky Crossing the Caucasian Range, 1892 oil on canvas; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.