Do you sometimes sit in front of your computer, wanting to get on with your Family History research, and you simply cannot make up your mind which line to look at? This is happening to me a bit lately and I don’t like it.

I have so many lines to follow, all ongoing, and there are times when I just feel a bit overwhelmed by it all. My tree stands at the moment at 25,600 so you can imagine I have an enormous amount of names to cover.

It’s just a case of taking them all back a step at a time, I pick one and find that I still cannot take it beyond where I was when I was researching that particular name before. So I try another one and the same thing happens. I just sit there and think – now what!

Have I gone as far as I can with them or should I just stop thinking about it and get on, pick another name and give it another go. I think I am probably in ‘research doldrums’. I am becalmed, I am making no discernible headway and it is causing me a lot of frustration.

What do you all do when you hit this situation? How do you re-motivate yourself? Perhaps you don’t get like this, but if you do and you have any good tips on how to get out of this mindset I would be very pleased to hear them.

I am still passionately interested in my Family History but just for the moment I feel like I am treading water. I just cannot settle to any one name, I am fluttering about, chopping and changing, and this is just not the way I normally work at all.

Perhaps I should leave it all for a week and come back to it, hoping my mind will focus better. I love looking out for my ancestors and really feel links with them – but not this week.

I have reached the stage where I have become a bit blase about constantly adding hundreds of names and dates to my family tree. I managed to slot into a titled family pedigree last year and from that connection my tree has just grown by literally thousands. I never believed that I would tire  of adding more people – but I have.

Now I feel I want to back-track and add more meat to the bones of the people I already have. I am ashamed to say that I  found myself totally ignoring all my near relations in favour of all these new names, royals, peers etc. It was so exciting finding kings and queens from all over the globe being added every day – but then I sat back and realized that just about everyone would be able to add these sort of people to their tree if they were looking so it was no big deal to have them.

I read today that most everyone in the UK will be descended from people who were living around the year 1400 who survived one of the big plagues which decimated the population by up to 60%. That makes a lot of sense.

Naturally I am still pleased to have these connections but to be quite honest I hardly dare mention them to anyone because I feel sure they will think I am just showing off and I certainly don’t want to come across that way.

I do enjoy knowing these people are in my past but I am putting it into perspective and realizing that, although everyone in your past has to have had some impact on you through the gene pool, your nearest relatives and ancestors will have had a lot more impact.

Therefore, I am now going back to the beginning and following all my early additions to the tree. Looking at the connections again and trying to find out more details about these people. I do still have some brickwalls that I try to scale now and again, some of these brickwalls are going to stay that way because no matter where I look I just cannot find anything more about them. It is quite frustrating but I have to put it behind me and move on again to someone else.

I have on occasion used information from other peoples tree whose line has crossed mine. I have to be totally honest and say that I have accepted their details as correct. If these have come from Genes Reunited for instance and citations have been added for the information I feel quite comfortable using these details, but I am sure I am not alone in using information which has not included sufficient citations.

These are the sort of areas that I am going to work on and try to confirm the information. It is very easy to think Hooray, all this and I have not had to do any of the work to get it, but beware, the information can be only as good as the source. It might not be good because in turn this information has been taken from yet another persons tree without proper authentication anywhere along the line.

It all does need to be confirmed before you can be totally comfortable that your tree is truly authentic.