The Search Continues

Snow on Fields
January 1, 2008

January holds the promise of a new year ready to fill with love, laughter and memories. For the most part it is cold and dreary perfect for indoor activities. This is the time of year I swing into high gear for genealogy research and will continue at this pace with the exception of our winter vacation until planting time. Don't get me wrong as genealogy is always on my mine but this is the time of year to attack those brick walls from a fresh perspective. Sometimes what is needed especially with research is to step away. December is such a busy month that it provides a bit of a break from thinking about my elusive ancestors.

Most of the time in January will be spent doing online research at Ancestry.com, the PRDH and Library and Archives Canada. Most of the research involves visually scanning microfilmed records not online family trees that at best are usually full of errors. I tend to keep very odd hours and get little sleep. The frustration level increases each time I draw a blank on one of my brick walls. In terms of genealogy, a brick wall is where you get to a person on one of your lines and suddenly you are at a standstill. There are no leads other than perhaps the name and the time frame. It is as if that person never existed! At the moment I have two brick walls of concern. One couple is my third great grandparents and the other my fourth great grandparents. What is frustrating about both is they were both French and Catholic. Anyone doing genealogy knows you can't get much better than that for records. Even more frustrating is I can trace down from the founding ancestor of my third great grandparents and upwards from me to my third great grandparents. And I've only been searching for the past six years for information on this one couple. The only thing I'm missing is the connecting generation. But I uncovered a very minute lead on my fourth great grandfather so perhaps it will lead to something.

The past few days I have been trying to find the ship my great grandparents and great great grandparents came from England on. [These are not related to the grandparents mentioned in the last paragraph.] I already have a lot of information on them but still haven't found the ship. According to the information I have my great grandparents married in England then emigrated to Canada arriving at their final destination in June of 1909. Well that narrows it down a bit considering in 1909 there were 203 arrivals from England. Each ship's manifest lists the names of the passengers and crew. For each manifest there can be upwards of 40 or more images to scan through in the hopes of finding your ancestors. That means scanning upwards of 8,000 images! The writing and quality are not the best at times but it is better than going through rolls of microfilm at the Archives and printing at home is a lot cheaper. If you would like to see a sample of what these records look like click here. That means massive eye strain from long hours in front of a computer screen viewing images with the full knowledge that perhaps the date is off by a year either way that could mean visually scanning upwards of another 16,000 images and I still might not find them.

Seriously my eyes look like I've been crying as the lids are swollen coupled with allergy shiners accented by lack of sleep circles. I should look right purdy by the time we leave for vacation. The good news is we are meeting up with some of my husband's relatives aka genealogy mecca :) My family knows I'm alive because I still cook for them and occasionally do the happy dance having found a new clue or the really excited, yelling "I found it". My husband stands in total awe that the blob aka his wife who is so engrossed in genealogy can actually show signs of life over a "name" or some other "clue". And so it goes, the search continues...