Getting Sidetracked

I haven't spent as much time as I would have liked researching my Colemans and Murrays over the last several months.  In part this is due to needing some answers to some questions to get through a couple of walls, and in part to getting sidetracked on another genealogy project.  Earlier this year my sister-in-law, "Sissie" was contacted by someone doing estate research and it seems that a cousin of her mother's had passed away with out any heirs and so a search went out for living relatives.  Her mother passed away about twenty years ago and Sissie really didn't know much about her family history, so I offered to do some research to see what I could find out.

Armed with what little Sissie knew, including the name of the deceased cousin, I dove in to see what I could find.  I spent a chunk of the spring and summer looking for records and have managed to find quite a bit -- tracing her family back to before the US Civil War.  I know I can go further back too, but that will take a little more effort as I'm now looking at pre-1850 census records which only listed the names of the heads of households and makes matching families up a bit more challenging.  I've also found names of apparent relatives in several census records as Sissie's ancestors were mostly farmers and all lived near each other in and around Indiana and Kentucky.  That is a time intensive process that I've yet to really focus on.  So far, however, I've identified over 150 relatives in her tree -- a massive increase over what she already knew.

Sissie was particularly interested in any living relatives.  I told her those people would be a bit harder to identify because records of living people are protected by privacy laws and much harder to obtain.  However in my searching I kept running up against another family tree on Ancestry.com that had members of Sissie's family and, most particularly, information on one of her grandmother's sisters that I had been unable to find elsewhere.  After checking with Sissie, I sent a message off to the owner of the tree to see if the person could help fill in gaps.  My luck with such messaging has been hit and miss while working on my own tree, so I was pleasantly surprised when about two months later I actually got a response from the owner of the tree.  It turned out the owner of the tree is Sissie's second cousin!  I was personally thrilled beyond belief and was able to make an email introduction between the cousins.

Things have been pretty much on hold from then, but it has been a fun distraction for me.  Family tree research can get frustrating when you run up against brick walls caused by missing information or insufficient information, so it's nice to step back from one line and focus on another from time to time.  Having a whole separate tree to root around in when I get frustrated with the progress in my own tree is a great way to go off on another adventure.