Stuck in a Loop

When you hit a roadblock, sometimes the best thing is to set the person aside and come back (days, weeks, or even years later) to take a fresh look. Perhaps working on collateral lines will shed new light. Or, in the future, there may be new records to peruse. All of this is sensible and genealogists do this all the time. You can't force the records, they either exist or they don't, and you'll either find them, or you won't. Sometimes, the wheels are spinning but it's not getting us anywhere. 

So why am I finding it so hard to set aside the 25 people in my tree Ancestry's ProTools says I need some form of documentation for? They account for only 0.8% of my tree, so this isn't a big out of control issue. 15 of them I know only a surname or given name (but not both, making them harder to find). But 10 of them, I believe I have the given name and surname (and sometimes middle name or initial as well). Some are from far in the past, and some are quite recent. Recent is usually somewhat easier for me to locate (but not in this case). Why can't I let them go? 

I'm stuck in a loop. Just about every day, when I finish my "regular" research, I pop over and try to find something...anything for these people. Is ProTools Tree Checker a good motivator? Sure, it seems to be for me. It's now my personal mission to get to 0 people with no documentation. But is it a valuable use of my time? Probably not so much when I'm not making progress. Were perseverance alone enough, I'd be golden. But it's all about finding the records. And those records are eluding me. I'm spinning my wheels on the same searches, when my time would likely be better spent on researching other parts of my tree.

Is it possible I have incorrect names? It's totally possible! These are names mined from obituaries, death certificates, Social Security  and other records where there could certainly be spelling errors or where information was provided by an outside source who may have gotten it wrong. I can't be sure until I find a matching record, preferably more than one. If I'm spinning my wheels on bad data, I'll keep returning no results. I need to find a way to either set this personal goal aside (for now) or come up with a new (and more inventive way) of searching. It might be time to reassess my research goals, and set some new (perhaps smaller, more achievable) goals to help me break free of the loop. It doesn't mean I'll stop looking, but maybe not so frequently.

Letting go isn't easy! What do you do when you find yourself stuck in a genealogy loop? 

Image by Thorsten Dahl from Pixabay

Netflix Review: The Breakthrough (Genetic Genealogy Drama)

I really enjoy shows about genealogy. Along with countless others, I watch the ongoing series where professional genealogists help celebrities, and the sometimes not so famous, find their ancestors. I've often wished there was a 24/7 genealogy channel, but alas, there isn't one available from my cable provider.

This weekend, all caught up on the plethora of shows I regularly watch, I went to Netflix to find a new show to binge. I landed on "The Breakthrough", a 2025 Netflix limited series based on a true story. Per Wikipedia "It is based on a non-fiction book by journalist Anna Bodin and genealogist Peter Sjölund about how the 2004 murders of Mohammed Ammouri and Anna-Lena Svensson were finally solved in 2020 through forensic genetic genealogy."

Originally in Swedish, it's dubbed in English with an occasional subtitle, but not very many. I'm not normally a fan of dubbing, but this was done very well. It's a 4 part limited series, so it's not a big time investment. It chronicles the 2nd biggest murder investigation in Sweden. While based on a true story, it's not presented in a documentary format. There are no interviews with those involved in the investigation. It's simply a well done drama.

I watched it in one afternoon and found it very enjoyable. It was a reminder how far genetic genealogy has come in a short time. Well worth a watch if you have an afternoon free.

Hello Great Great GrandPappy!

So there I was, stuck in an endless loop of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result. Let me back up a little. I was working on finding sources for one of the (few) unsourced people in my tree. He was my mother's Aunt Opal's 3rd husband. I know he existed because his surname is in the Social Security records for Aunt Opal. His last name is Couch. His given name? I wish I knew! 

While most trees have her first two husbands (and associated children), few have any mention of the third husband. One Ancestry user tree shows him as Frank (but has no sources). Ancestry helpfully shows me several Joe Couch records....but Aunt Opal was Opal Estelle Robertson and Joe was married to Opal Fay White. Another dead end (and a good reminder how important it is to really delve into a hint to be sure it's correct). I'd searched every way I could think of several times over, but wasn't getting anywhere on any site I tried.

Then I had a brilliant flash of memory! Didn't I see a photo of Aunt Opal in one of the albums I brought home from my father's house? I'm sure I did! And don't I very clearly remember on the back of one a photography studio stamp with Couch in it? Maybe? Yes, definitely maybe! Off to the storage bin to see if I could locate it. Half an hour later, having dug out and looked thru several albums (but not the boxes of loose photos) I hadn't found a single image of Aunt Opal. But I was happily lifting photos off the not so sticky anymore pages looking at the backs to see if there were any identifying notes. And then I saw it! 

"Well there's someone I don't recognize" I thought to myself. It was a dapper older gentleman in a nice enough suit, staring thoughtfully into the distance. On the back of the photo, in my mother's beautiful script was "William Jefferson Robertson, Grandpa Robbie's father). It took me a moment to understand who Grandpa Robbie was. I didn't have any great grandpa Robert, Robbie, Robby or Bob. Then it hit me, my great grandfather Nathan Newell Robertson must have been called Grandpa Robbie (presumably for his surname Robertson)....this was his father, who I had identified in the past, but had never seen a photo of before. 

After I carefully tracked back the generations one finger at a time, mom...grandma...Nathan Newell...William...four fingers...I exclaimed "Hello Great Great GrandPappy! It's nice to meet you!" His photo is shown above. The facial shape reminds me a little of my grandmother, but I would never have figured out who it was without the note my mother carefully penned. I'm so glad she did. While I don't know for sure the year this was taken, I uploaded the image to MyHeritage. I hadn't tried the photo dating there yet and this seemed a good way to test it out. It estimated the image as being around 1921. 

William was born in 1857 in South Carolina. As with many of my ancestors, he was a farmer. By the 1870 census he had moved to Georgia. In 1881 he married Eliza Elvira Kuhn, and somewhere between 1911-1914 he married Ida Franklin. He had 3 sons between the two marriages. By 1890, property tax records show he owned a farm, and by the 1910 census his property was valued at $1500. From all appearances, he was a moderately successful farmer. While his life seems somewhat unremarkable, I'm sure he was a hard worker because farming is not an easy occupation. He died in Georgia in 1946 and is buried there.

I never did find the picture of Aunt Opal (but I will eventually go through the box of loose photos at some point). Finding this photo knocked me out of my insanity loop and "introduced" me to someone I never thought I'd "see".

Original photo in possession of Ancestry User patndoris94