As with much of my life, my genealogcial work goes in spurts; I love to get deeply into a project and run with it until the demands of life pull me, reluctantly, away—or until I get heartily sick of it and must set it aside for a while. Genealogical research is not all success and great discovery; documentation and data entry are mostly tedious gruntwork, and mining for new data produces much more gangue than ore. I'm now at a stage where what's needed most is organization and the above-mentioned gruntwork, so naturally I'm finding other projects more attractive.
Thus it is amusing as well as delightful to find myself showered last week with more new data than I can do justice to in a month. Perhaps it's a case of casting one's bread upon the waters, for it began when, as part of my e-mail backlog reduction project, I organized and cleaned up my data on the descendants of Louisa Curtiss and Benjamin Wells for someone who had requested it. (That was one of the e-mails from 2005!) In the process I happened upon a piece of information that led to a major breakthrough in my Rice line, about which I will write later.The very next day I heard from a cousin the amazing news that she, doing some housecleaning after my aunt's death, discovered boxes of pictures (alas, mostly unlabelled) and two exciting documents: a professional genealogy of my Vick line created in the early 1940's, and a genealogy of my Smith ancestors done probably in the early 1890's by a family member. The Vick information is almost totally new and pushes that line back quite a ways. I already knew much of the direct-line Smith information, but there's much that is new on the collateral lines, some great details and family stories, and gratifying confirmation of several guesses I'd made from existing data.
Wiping the drool from my mouth I rushed over to my cousin's house to borrow the treasures, thinking I could scan the pages and the useful photos and return them in a day or two. Ha! I'm doing what I can to get the material back to them in a timely fashion, but I'm up to 150 scans so far and not halfway through. This is just scanning; analyzing and entering the data will take much, much longer.
Not that I mind in the least.Someday I'll get back to it all. I meet with Mr. Crandall in a week and a half, so I will have to have some thoughts prepared to share with him.
Make sure you glean all possible information from the photos (like portrait studio) before you return them. That information can be a big help in identification as I have learned first hand.
