A Lot of Genealogical Challenges Lately

 

I guess I was a little preoccupied with challenges in my recent blog posts. Not only did I find researching the immigrant challenging, I also found lost or missing records and access to genealogical records as challenges. Yes, they are all challenges, and they all have one thing in common: records that are not and possibly never will become unavailable. Genealogy is a process of discovery, and we are always getting into uncharted territory and sometimes going completely off the map. 

A challenge is something that is harder to do than those things that are in our comfort zone. As you become more experienced in genealogical research, the challenges increase in difficulty until you find yourself lacking the time, resources, or knowledge to find any more records. My solution to this challenge has always been the same; learn more. Every time I come to the end of an ancestral investigation; I start learning. But the reality of historical research is that for any one ancestral person, the necessary records may not have been kept or may have been lost. Immigrants fail to record their place of origin, the information needed to identify an ancestor's parents may have never been recorded or was lost to a fire/earthquake/flood/whatever. Finally, there may be some bureaucrat sitting in an office guarding a pile of records in the attic or basement and neither I nor anyone else is going to ever know the records are there slowly decaying away. 

Despite all this, the reality of genealogical work is that most people give up before they even get to the real challenge. One example is the would-be genealogist who starts a family tree on a popular online, family tree website and runs out of automatic record hints and thinks that is the end of the line for investigation without realizing that there are hundreds or thousands of other places to look. 

Now this brings up the factual basis for my preoccupation with challenges. Too many times in the past, my inability to find the next record was based on my own ignorance of the options for further research. The next hill or rock to climb just seems to be getting further away and harder to climb until I stop researching and try another ancestral line for a while. Currently, my nearest end-of-line situations are in the 7th generation and in the mid-1700s in Wales and Denmark. Four people out of sixty-four. They are the parents of David Thomas (b. about 1791, d. 1836 in Llandilo-Fawr, Camarthen, Wales) and the parents of Marianne Larsdatter (b. 1812, d. 1855 in Denmark). Both end-of-line people have extremely common names and in both cases the records are not easy to research. Notwithstanding this, the real reason is that I have yet to focus on these two people. 

Now that I have focused on both people by writing about them, I find once again, the issue is time, availability, and access. There are new records on FamilySearch.org and MyHeritage.com that may help to solve one or both challenges. I am also more familiar with the other local and national records available in both Wales and Denmark. Each time I go through this process, I can climb a little higher on the hill.