Down the rabbit hole

[Top-of-the-hill]

   "Disappearing down a rabbit hole" is my daughter's description of those times when we spend ages obsessively tracking someone through the records - often someone with no great relevance, but you still do it. When you come back up, you wonder why you did it.
    I thought it was quite apt.

[Viktoria]

 --Yes,and you do find some odd characters down there!
Murderers,philanderers,hard workers,drunkards.Wonderful grandmas,tragic cousins,but as yet no white rabbits,flamingos, queens and kings.or Cheshire cats.
Mind you---there is still time!Viktoria.

[ThrelfallYorky]

My term for a hopeless quest working backwards is when people " emerge dripping from the Irish Sea, at Liverpool" - it's too, too true. As soon as I see "Ireland" on an 1840s / 1850s / 1860s census, with no further detail, as place of birth, I now make no further efforts on that poor person. Experience tells me it's hopeless.

[Viktoria]

Would that be because of the fire which destroyed many Irish records?
Some one in my family ,their records were amongst those destroyed when a bomb dropped on the Records Office ,I think.In London.
To be remembered even if your records are incomplete is a sort of immortality,well the next best thing for ordinary people who for the most part led mundane unexciting lives.
Remembrance is all we can do for them.
I`m getting sad now
I might go and write my obituary ,no one else will do it as  I want it to be.
                                                     Viktoria.

[Sinann]

Would that be because of the fire which destroyed many Irish records?
Some one in my family ,their records were amongst those destroyed when a bomb dropped on the Records Office ,I think.In London.
To be remembered even if your records are incomplete is a sort of immortality,well the next best thing for ordinary people who for the most part led mundane unexciting lives.
Remembrance is all we can do for them.
I`m getting sad now
I might go and write my obituary ,no one else will do it as  I want it to be.
                                                     Viktoria.

A fire in the records office in Dublin.
This will tell you what was lost (not as much as people claim)
https://www.irish-genealogy-toolkit.com/irish-records-burned.html

[ThrelfallYorky]

It's not so much what may have been lost that deters and defeats me, more they simply NEVER said where in Ireland - north or south - any of them came from, they seemed to arrive ready-married, and to be very undocumented ... oh, and not too certain about their ages, either!