52W Mark III – Week 44: Challenging

The prompt this week for the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Challenging”. You know what is challenging? The 52 Ancestors Challenge, that’s what!!

Starting the 52 Ancestors Challenge was hard:

Three years in a row, I signed up for Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks”. The first two times, that was as far as I got. Hopefully, third time’s the charm. Hence this blog, only a quarter century behind the times.

As I later described it:

I originally signed up for the 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2020, but did nothing afterwards. I signed up again for 2021, for which I also did nothing.

Somehow third time was the charm. I know there was something that spurred me on to actually do something for the 2022 challenge, but now for the life of me I can’t recall what that was!

Halfway through my first year actually participating in the Challenge, I wrote:

Holy smokes, we’re now halfway through the year. Moreover, with 26 installments, we’re halfway through this year’s 52 Ancestors Challenge! With that, I’ve managed to consistently blog for six months. While it has been a bit of a slog the last few weeks, I’m so pleased I’ve stuck with it and made it this far!

I persevered and successfully completed the year. Building on that success, I signed up for 2023 edition of the Challenge. Once again, I completed all 52 weeks. Not only that, but I turned my first year’s set of posts in to a book that I printed and handed out as Christmas and Hannukah gifts!

Buoyed by that success, I re-upped a third time, for the 2024 edition of the Challenge. With eight weeks to go, I’m confident I’ll successfully complete all 52 weeks.

However, I have to be honest. The Challenge is becoming more challenging. I’ve picked the low hanging fruit several times now. It’s getting harder and harder to write about things I haven’t already covered before – sometimes more than once. Many times this year I thought I had come up with something entirely new, only to discover partway through or near completion that I had already written about the same thing. This year seems to have a few reruns, as I really did not want to start over. In fact, just discovered that I’ve already sort of covered the topic of the challenge of participating in the Challenge.

As a result, for the last month or so I haven’t produced anything for the current week before the next prompt is posted. (Although, ironically, the one week I was ahead of the prompt, it was delayed!) I know what Amy would say about that, but I’d still enjoy it more if I could keep more current.

As I’ve said before, the primary purpose of undertaking this blog was to get myself to write more about my family history after decades of researching and compiling information. Even though this year has been more challenging, I am still achieving that goal and continue to find value in participating.

That said, I don’t think I have it in me to do another full year of the Challenge, at least not in the way I’ve participated for nearly three years. However, I will need to think of something that is still regular and structured; without it, I can see a future where posts become fewer and farther apart in time, until it just peters out. Fortunately, Amy recently posted (I can’t remember if it was in her Facebook group, Generations Cafe, or in her emails) that she was planning something new or different for 2025. I can’t wait to see what that might be!

In the meantime, having completed a second full year of posts, I once again created a family history book based upon the compiled collection of entries for 2023! I hadn’t planned on another print edition, but as I started working on the electronic version I began to feel the need to be able to hold it and read it the old fashioned way. So here it is, A Book of Ancest0rs – Mark II!!