The Madness of the Hunt (or Why Am I Researching the 2nd Wife of my Husband's 3rd Cousin Once Removed?)

My genealogy helper, Stella

Today I looked up after several hours of on-line research and suddenly realized how far off-track I had gotten.  It is easy these days to get far afield with the ever-growing number of records available on-line.

I found myself trying to find the second wife of my husband's 3rd cousin 1 time removed.  What?  How did I get here?

As I wrote the other day, I've been pretty focused on the family of Woodford Hector Dulaney lately.  I was hoping to find a group of pictures from an exhibition in 1929.  A long shot, at best.  But I thought that maybe if I could find some living descendants of the family, maybe they would have the pictures.  That is ok, as far as it goes.

But doing this kind of research is at best fascinating and at worst, addictive.   And it seems these days, the records available are almost unlimited.

When I started doing genealogy in the 1970s, it was a different pursuit.  You would look at what you knew about a family, make educated guesses about where the next record might be, write a query, mail it by snail mail with a check and SASE, and then wait.  And wait.   And wait.  Then once the reply came, decide what was next.

Now, there is still some of that today.  Not everything is available on-line, of course.  In fact, I sent out a couple of queries by mail just recently.  More often, I use email, but that isn't always available.

But now, you can search amazing databases of vital records and newspapers and all sorts of other documents that just were not readily available when I first started.   It used to be that checking the census for someone meant hours in a dark library at a microfilm reader.  Now you just log in, plug them in and wade through the options.

But all these easily available records are sometimes more curse than blessing.  I was just going along trying to sort out Florence Dulaney & her husband, Albert Willis, and suddenly I'm looking at the children of the first marriage of the second wife of Florence and Albert's son.  Time to take a break!

It is not as if I don't have a ton of data to sift through already.  And blog posts I want to write.  But I will see some shiny little tidbit of data and suddenly I'm off on a tangent and headed down a path that goes a different direction from where I need to be focused.  Oh, look!  Passport applications....  Wait, do I have that obit?   Look at all those City Directory listings for my great-grandfather's second cousin!... Oh, is that pictures of ships?  Maybe.... but do I have a picture of that tombstone......  Oooh!  Could that be the daughter of the person I was looking for last week?......

That said, maybe it is time to do a post on one of the craziest tangents I've been on (and one that I had a lot of help with from my sister):  I'll call it "The Six Wives of Dr. Ralph Tilley or Poor Frank."  Of course, doing a post about chasing one of the shiny objects is in itself just another form of chasing that shiny thing.  Oh well.

I have a feeling I'm not alone.