How much time is enough time to spend on a brick wall ancestor before moving on to something else?

Question

Can't you just be too focused on one thing that you aren't getting anything done?  Isn't there a time you have to say I have worked on this ancestor and that you could be doing other research and get much more done on another ancestor?  These are just some questions I wonder.  I mean I have been doing my family research since 1998.  I have had some break throughs after spending so much time and working a specific county on familysearch.org and they find something great to move back.  But really I have not gone back another generation in years.  At some point isn't it just time to move on?  Work the children of that ancestor or a different angle I say

Comments

I think so. It's so hard to let go of the dream of solving a family mystery, but if you've exhausted all avenues of info, and after months (or in my case years!) of searching have still not solved the riddle, it's okay to let it go ... it may even be healthy to!  I've had to settle on just a name on a couple of lines and as much as I disliked admiting defeat, I'm okay with that. 

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I also think it is important not to say or think "defeat", perhaps "postpone" is better.  I found a link some years back to a great-grandmother in the Supreme Court records of Tennessee, but have had to wait until 2 months ago for verification of her father.  That was because some GLO records for a particular county in Arkansas were posted. recently, I guess it was recently, because I'd never seen them before.  Now, finding out more about the great-great grandfather (her father) is another story.  Also, we need to remind ourselves that brick walls are much more likely to crumble than those concrete ones built with rebar.

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Maybe not defeat, lol, "acceptance" may have been a better choice of word. Truth is not all family brickwalls can be broken, they simply are built with rebar. In my reply I was thinking of one in particular which has bugged 4 generations of my family, the true identity of my gt gt grandfather, one William Foster. He will never be known to us, not even via dna as there are no male descendants living - my grandfather was the only and last. Four generations of family, and extended family, have scoured every avenue open, closed, out there, way out there ... and with a name as common as William Foster not a one of us has got anywhere. The closest any one of us has ever come to being able to identify him was being able to at least confirm that William Foster was his name - I'm happy with that. However, if I think about other brick walls I have much reason to hope, one day that info will come along I have no doubt, as records become available, or family travel to far away places and look at original documents first hand, or distant cousins who know a new snippet/lead make contact - one of the best things about Wikitree is that that happens often :) Sometimes a brick wall is a brick wall no matter how much you try to tell your self it is made of something else. And re William Foster ... we will never know anything more than that he was William Foster born ? in ?.

Answer 1

Absolutely Kelly, if you can’t go upward can you go sideways? Then maybe you can go up with another branch, which could unlock info that has been ‘hidden’.

Alternatively, try another side, ie paternal not maternal.

There is no point in fixating on one profile.

The good thing is more records are coming online all the time, and our ancestors are resting comfortably and will wait.

Comments

Thanks for the star Kelly

Answer 2

I would think working on the Children, would go hand in hand with finding information on the generation above.

An unexpected Uncle or Aunt could appear in a census for one, Marriages of the Children could also give information even if its only an address, witness, or whether the Parent is deceased.

Also finding a child previously missed (Married Young, Lived with Grandparents etc).

Answer 3

HI Kelly,

     Like everything else, you have to budget your time.  Personally I have been prompted by Ancestry.com and other genealogy sites to add GGrandparents and others simply based on undocumented family trees that have been published.  With names as common as Murray, (for example), one can find tens of different individuals born in Ireland in the same year, so one needs to get some specific evidence to state which if any is the REAL ancestor.  Most of my breakthroughs come from finding obituaries in old newspapers, (I use a (free) upstate NY site called Fultonhistory.com, but I'm sure there are others for other parts of the world).  In the meantime, I work on the ever expanding margins of the family tree, (not just my bloodlines).   If you keep your eyes open and watch the internet , (like the National Library of Ireland's RC Church records which you can browse if you can get by the cursive and the Latin) you never know where or when you will get that breakthrough.

     Keep at it and enjoy the hobby, (And get involved with some of the projects on WikiTree if you can contribute)

Bob

Answer 4

Taking a break can work wonders, too.

I was stuck on finding the great grand parents -  too many McDonalds. I left it for a few weeks, and found them through a sibling's death - over a 100 years after the gg parents were born. It was a bit of a serendipitous trail, but all the pieces fit.

Comments

I had a brick wall with George Rainford in London, a non-conformist (Roman Catholic) born abt 1812 so his family records were in private congregation rosters separate from Church of England .  I traveled to London and searched libraries.  I hired a professional.  The harder I worked, the more elusive he became.  Finally I took a break of several years and some newly digitized non-conformist indexes look promising; new records emerge.  That being said, I'll hunt him till I drop :)

Answer 5

Sometimes if you go work on someone else for a while you'll find new leads. I was looking for basic vital stats for the father of a cousin of mine and couldn't find anything. I left it and went to work on other people, including sorting out the messy family of my grandmother's aunt - multiple marriages, children from each marriage who then took the names of their stepfathers, just to make them harder to find!

It turned out that my cousin's father was the stepson of my grandmother's aunt, but he had a different last name. Then I had the birth and death dates and plenty of sources.