It has been a couple of months since I have written a decent blog, in my opinion anyway. I have had the extreme pleasure of helping a few people with their family trees. It has been as interesting as if I was researching my own family. Ancestors in mental institutions, ancestors run over by a train in front of a pub, and even resident aliens in a “boys refuge home” for juveniles who have committed crimes. I have learned so much about these different institutions, the time frame for having access to certain types of records and being saddened by some of the outcomes of these people. Most of these people have come to the United States or Canada for a better life only to find themselves in more trouble in one way or another.
Since I am in a holding pattern with a couple of jobs I’m working on; waiting on records and information, I decided to give a couple of hours to my tree. I designated a few hours on two of my “brick walls”. Although I cleaned up some errors, I didn’t make any breakthroughs. I was rather frustrated. So, I decided to go through some more of my “limbs” and “leaves” and clean up other errors I had found. I bought a flash drive with more memory to back up my tree and made sure things were synched.
I have a tree on Ancestry® and also a database with Family Tree Maker (FTM) which sync together. If one goes down, I still have the information on the other one. I also back up my tree on a flash drive so I can easily “rebuild” if necessary. Of course, I also save all my information on my computer and the “cloud”, wherever that may be. My blogs also help me to keep things backed up too.
If you are working on your family tree, make sure you are saving things and backing things up. Even on Ancestry, you lose access to those records if your subscription lapses if you haven’t downloaded hard copies for yourself.
In doing so, a lot of those little leaves popped up telling me I had Ancestry hints galore. My tree was feeling neglected. So, I have given myself the challenge to commit to one or two hours to one person a day on a particular line. For instance, the Logan line is not finished but it is as far as I can go right now. I need that connection from Ireland to Scotland. That missing link!
The next logical step now is to follow my father’s mother’s line. I will follow her father’s line, the Kunkle’s, to make sure I have exhausted all findings there. I did extensive research on them years ago, but I need to revisit them to make sure I haven’t missed anything… or anyone.
Maybe I’ll find someone interesting to blog about, after all, they were glassmakers.
If you need research assistance for your family tree, do not hesitate to contact me.
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Loganalogy- The Family Historian 