The other day as I was driving from my home to the grocery store, there were lanes blocked off on the street I was on. I needed to make a left turn but the way that traffic was offset it looked a bit dicey. So I decided to take another route, taking my left turn a couple of blocks later. Once I made my left, I found traffic backed up on that second route as there was construction there too and up ahead only a single lane open on the street I was on. As I sat there in the lineup waiting our turn on the single lane, I thought how my journey that day was a great metaphor for my current research.
Currently, I'm supposed to be looking for the veterans in my family tree as the BCGS will be putting together a book with the military ancestors we submit. I have a few ancestors who were veterans and, while it is easier to find the more immediate ones, like people who served in WWI or WWII, the word is that they already have enough of those. What they are looking for are those who served in other wars, more distant ones. The problem is that they also want to know their relationship to the submitter. I've researched quite a few of the military types attached to my family. Some I've even written about on this blog, but I've never really spelled out my relationship to them. This looks like another case where having the collateral lines on my family tree filled out would be handy. That's on top of how those collateral lines would help with figuring out my DNA matches. I need to do that to keep up with the DNA Study group. Maybe it would also enable me to find the link to that illusive match who emailed me. Filling out the collaterals would probably also help with the story I'm writing about Alexander Matheson.
Looks like adding those collaterals to my family tree is my current road block. It's just so much work that I've been putting it off. If I'm going to do that work, I should also test our new family tree software so that all of my work doesn't exist solely on the Ancestry site. As part of Kathryn Lake Hogan's Starting Out or Starting Over sessions that she offered this year, we checked out various family tree software. One that I hadn't heard of before, Family Historian, looked like a good fit for me especially as it was put out by a UK based company. Most of my research and family were based in the UK and some of the extras they offer looked like they would be helpful. I think it's time to bite the bullet and get started. I just wish my road block would clear up as quickly as the ones I ran into on my way to the grocery store. When I checked the next day, both road blocks were gone and traffic was running smoothly again.
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