Happy Family History Month! I’m not sure how October was chosen to celebrate the work we do as family historians, but it feels good that someone, whoever it is that decides these things, feels that we’re worthy of a month’s worth of celebrating. It’s worth noting that it’s also “National Women in AI Month,” “National Chili Month,” “World Menopause Month,” “National Sensory Processing Awareness Month,” “I’m Just Me Because Month,” “National Physical Therapy Month,” “Breast Cancer Awareness Month,” and many more. I’m sure you get the picture.
But, with it being Family History Month, I decided to take a look at where my research stands. My tree on Ancestry has 3281 people currently. I’ve probably done what I would consider good research on about 20% of that list. A lot of the names date back to when I had absolutely no idea of what constituted quality family history research. I’m going back and doing the research on those as time permits. But proper research takes a lot of time, and my other activities are demanding a lot of my time, too.
I’m finding that researching and writing about my ancestors is taking a lot more time than before. Some of that is because I’m more interested in producing a quality narrative with good sourcing. But another really large part is that there are so many new sources being made available every day!
AI tools and all the family heritage sites are producing research hints faster than I can read them! It’s frustrating to go back to an ancestor I’ve researched heavily to find another tranche of clues pointing to documents I’ve never seen. Those AI bots are crawling databases, scanning and translating documents, and making them available to us at an unbelievable rate. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about it. It just makes me hesitate to publish anything, knowing that it will be obsolete before anyone reads it.
Nevertheless, I will keep writing my family history stories, knowing that my research will never be complete for any of them. Happy Family History Month, folks. I hope you’re all finding a lot of new information about your relatives, too.
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