This week, the 52 Ancestors Challenge asks us to consider “Overlooked”. What might I have overlooked? If I knew the answer to that, it wouldn’t be overlooked!
Thinking it over, it’s not so much what I’ve overlooked as what I’ve ignored.
- All children of my ancestors other than the child from whom I’m descended
This is actually a thing of the past, but it’s a case of doing the work now that I should have done a very long time ago.
Back in the day – decades ago, now – I would sometimes ignore the multitude of children some of my ancestors brought into this world. Sometimes it was when a couple had ten or more children. More often than not, it was something I did when an ancestor remarried, or had an earlier marriage, which produced children. One of my great great grandfathers had 19 children – nine with his first wife and ten with his second.
There were simply so many kids in some families – even in ones with parents who only ever had one marriage – that I didn’t feel like I had to the time to enter all of them into my database or that it was all that important. In the case of previous or subsequent marriages, I’d usually annotate the entry with a note saying how many children the couple had together. Sometimes I’d include the first names of those children, but without their vital stats. What a time saver!
Of course, anyone who has done genealogy for a while will have immediately spotted the error of my ways. I was foolishly ignoring my FAN club! Also known as “cluster genealogy”, “FAN” stands for “Friends, Associates, and Neighbours”, although over the years many have included “Family” amongst the friends. It is a term coined by Elizabeth Shown Mills, which involves researching the cluster of people around the person who is the target of the study. It often involves research of a person who might seem otherwise elusive. Evidence about their FANs might shed light on the otherwise mysterious relative.
I now make a point of including all the children of my direct ancestors. As well, I have a couple of direct ancestors for whom I am researching all their descendants. Of course, this has meant going back and properly adding all those children to my tree.
- Citations
You have to take the crunchy with the smooth. As much as I love genealogy, like all things, it has its down sides. For me, it’s writing up source citations.
It is such a tedious time-consuming chore that I’ll sometimes put down my genealogy for weeks or even months at a time. All the while, mounds of data, digital and paper, keep piling up because sometimes I can’t not research. On top of that, I often have a gazillion browser tabs open at a time, waiting for the day that I bite the bullet and start doing the work.
It’s the doing dishes of genealogy, yet absolutely vital to the process.
- Something I haven’t ignored?
This blog!
A Deck of Ancestors 