« Reply #15 on: Tuesday 12 September 17 18:24 BST (UK) »
Hi Coombs,
I have to agree with everyone else, never give up, just put it to one side and come back to it every now and then. I can identify with ThrelfallYorky's "Irish stew" comment I have quite a few Irish ancestors on the back burner!
In the last year, an old letter came to light that got us all talking about one ancestor again and some of the details confirmed that addresses and occupations we were unsure about were correct.
There are also a great many different types of records becoming available online.
Lastly, there are those eureka moments. A set of ancestors whose details you have been looking at for years and getting nowhere. Suddenly, you either think of a different approach or you recognise a pattern in addresses, names, occupations, etc.
No, I don't think you should ever give up.
Pet50ite
Yes, and sometimes you want to put it on a backburner and move on but you feel that you just want to concentrate on that line and put all others on a backburner. Spend days looking through records on Anc, FindMyPast, FamilySearch etc to see if any more info comes up that you missed. You may exhaust the records online but you keep thinking there must be loads more records that are not online, more than you think. Newspaper records, land/window tax records, rate books, poor law records, wills that are waiting to be digitised, local censuses.
Sadly in some cases when FindMyPast release new records for a county of interest the parishes you want are "coming soon". it is easy to think that you have to go to the RO in that case but sometimes you could live hundreds or thousands of miles from where your ancestors lived. Asking a researcher costs money. More online records the better.
Researching:
LONDON, Coombs, Roberts, Auber, Helsdon, Fradine, Morin, Goodacre
DORSET Coombs, Munday
NORFOLK Helsdon, Riches, Harbord, Budery
KENT Roberts, Goodacre
SUSSEX Walder, Boniface, Dinnage, Standen, Lee, Botten, Wickham, Jupp
SUFFOLK Titshall, Frost, Fairweather, Mayhew, Archer, Eade, Scarfe
DURHAM Stewart, Musgrave, Wilson, Forster
SCOTLAND Stewart in Selkirk
USA Musgrave, Saix
ESSEX Cornwell, Stock, Quilter, Lawrence, Whale, Clift
OXON Edgington, Smith, Inkpen, Snell, Batten, Brain