Where was I?

I have been sick now for a week. Darned throat thing morphed into the sinus infection from the lowest depths of Hell. My brain has been seriously fogged, and I have done little but cruise the web and watch movies via Netflix "Watch It Now".

I can't for the life of me remember where I was in my genealogical research.

This is mainly because I had maxed out all the "simple" research bits anyway -- the family tree "following" on Ancestry, along with the "Ancestry Hints" that go a long way toward the basics; the easy-to-find graves on Find-a-grave-dot-com; tracking things in an orderly fashion on my Personal Ancestral File software that's on my hard drive. Most of the "easy," somewhat orderly work has already been done.

My biggest problem is that I am NOT prone to be linear in my research. At the beginning it was easy to be linear ... you just plug in what you know of your family history, and then the Great Genealogical Websites (Ancestry, RootsWeb, FamilySearch, etc.) help you go backward from there. At first you don't know you have to be a little careful because you're basically copying other people's trees, but after awhile you get that and you're more discerning of the info you put into your own tree. From there you get into finding copies of original documents. Ancestry.com is amazing at helping you do this. Of course, Ancestry is not a free website -- it's fairly expensive, but well worth the money (and if you save up Christmas and/or birthday money, it's not so bad). They have sooooooo much in the way of original documents or indexes of documents that you can download to your own computer! I have enough original Census images on my family to choke a mule, were I to suddenly decide to roll them all up and try to stuff them down said poor creature's throat (which I really don't see happening).

From there things for me got crazy. I would get interested in one particular ancestor and decide to google him/her. Sometimes this would lead to more info, sometimes not. If they were in the military I would try to find out more about their unit, or see if I could find their military records at NARA (the National Archives database). I discovered Find-a-grave and realized I could get photos of many of my ancestors' headstones. I tried tracking down obituaries (which often have tons of personal information in them), land records, etc. And when I'd done all I could for the moment on that person, I'd find someone else and do the same all over again on them.

But it wasn't always linear. I might be interested in J. B. Smith, and from there get interested in his father, E. W. Smith. Then a relative would e-mail me about someone on the other side of the family and I'd get interested in them and abandon E. W. for awhile. Or I'd start scanning old family photos and find myself wanting to search out more about someone there. Bouncing around like a lemur on speed. I suppose at this point I should mention I have ADHD.

SO, that's what's making it difficult for me to go back and pick up whatever thread I was on when I got sick and my brain refused to do any more work. I haven't kept a log of what I was doing and when. Other than knowing that I was working on labeling photos in my computer and attaching them to people in my Personal Ancestral File (PAF).

Well ... guess I'll just have to "go fishing" for awhile and see what might jog my brain. Or, just start someplace new and see where it leads ...