Laundry isn't fun - it involves a lot of sorting and organizing and gathering and folding, which is the WORST - luckily, genealogical laundry doesn't involve the folding part, but sometimes, researching your family tree isn't about making new, exciting discoveries. Sometimes it's about just the nitty-gritty, the mundane task of figuring out what it is that you have and finding out what it is that you need. And not even in the sense of "Who was Great grandpa's parents?" In the sense of "I know everything there is to know about Great grandpa, now what documentation do I need to back that up?"
Lately I've been floundering, family history-wise. I have a lot of loose threads, a lot of incomplete information, a lot of new, exciting paths to continue down, but a lot a lot A LOT of rounding out the picture of people I've researched for years and know all the facts about but none of the story in between. It's been overwhelming and honestly, boring, all at the same time, and so I've just ignored it. Ignored it, ignored it, ignored it, and during Family History Month, too! ::shakes head::
So today I'm making a list, a laundry list if you will. I decided to check out the Italian Genealogy Group's website and it turns out they've added some new records to their index, and so I decided to look back at my own records and see what was missing. Some people I have death dates for because I found an obituary, but I have no death certificate. Some people I have a birth date for because of a census record but I have no birth certificate. I'm concentrating on my Queens-Brooklyn-Manhattan crew because city records are easier for me to get my hands on than Long Island records, but there are a lot of important corroborating records missing from my collection. And now that I have my list and can see the gaps, I can go about filling them in.
It's not the exciting work, but it's the necessary work...
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