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