I have been doing some family history over the last couple of weeks, but not a great deal and not with any real focus. As seems so often the case I am spending more time thinking about family history than actually doing any family history. Once again I have been trying to decide what I want to do next.
Time and motivation are still big issues in my life. I am reluctant to take on new projects that are going to take a lot of time or require a visit to a record office, because I know it is not going to get completed. I am just going to be left with another unfinished project and another bunch of new entries on my to-do list.
I think it is time for me to step back and look objectively at what I want to actually achieve with my research, and what I can realistically expect to achieve. Are my expectations too high? Am I trying to achieve too much? On one hand I want to push my tree back as far as I can, but on the other hand I also want to understand the lives of some of my closer ancestors (grandparents and great-grandparents) better.
One problem is that I think I am getting overwhelmed by the sheer size of my family tree, not that it is that big at the moment, still under a couple of thousand, but I know that I can never know everything about all of these individuals, no matter how long I live. All I need to do is accept this fact and focus on the ones I do want to know about.
For now though I think I am going to concentrate on some housekeeping, tidying up some loose ends and filling in a few gaps. There are many new collections online now that I haven’t really exploited fully and many documents/images that I haven’t extracted every last detail from.
