How do you choose?

[jinks]

I flit from one family to amother.

At present I am concentrating on my Harwood Family.

But I thought there would be so many of them.
And through the census of Blackburn and Darwen
(Lancashire) I am finding very few.

At the moment I am looking into whether my Ancestor was
married three times, because the only man with the
correct forename shows three spouse names on
the different census.
The marriages work now for the grisly bit deaths.

Jinks

[skymoo]

Im glad to see Im not the only one flitting around    Im looking forward to going to Norwich and seeing if I can find some old records there, but every now and thne I find myself drawn to someone.  The last one I went on a tangent with I couldnt find a birth of, then when I looked properly at the census realised there was a previous marriage for her mother which I had totally overlooked 
I have all records kept on a laptop and want to give my mother a christmas present of all the things I have found about her family on a cd    It could become a regular thing every year!
I have posted on roots about one brick wall and have a way through it and Im really excited now.  I didnt realise when my dad was researching his line quite how addictive this stuff is 
My kids have a vision of (if anyone has seen it) the Black family tree in Harry Potter painted on a wall but I dont think I will go that far!

[KathMc]

I too have felt drawn to certain people in my tree. the two with the biggest pull are both gg grandmothers of mine. One I think I have found out all I will on her short, sad life, but the other has some missing years that I am on a mission to fill in. In those years, her mother dies, her father remairries, her two siblings die and she somehow ends up living with some of her mother's relatives over 400 miles away. And interestingly, her uncle (who married into the family) really loved her as a daughter, but her blood relatives were awful, trying to steal money and land from her.

Kath

[Mumsie2131]

I've almost completed all my lines to my gt gt grandparents. At the moment I am involved with the cousins of one of my gt gt grandmothers because I have got their wills. The First one left the money to 3 nieces all called Mary and has turned into the mystery of the 3 Mary's because I haven't yet worked out which siblings of the will writer they are descended from.  I'm really enjoying the change of direction.

[rich23434565]

I've found that circumstances tend to dictate which lines you'll follow. For example, I have two branches that end in Ireland and I have absolutely no hope that I'll be able to advance them any further given the state of Irish records before the 1840s. My gran was illegitimate, so that's her father's branch out of the question. One branch comes from India so that's them out of the picture too. Location plays a big role. I need to access the records office at Lewes in the future but it's a long distance from where I live so that's on the back burner. Another branch is called Jones and came from London?! I have phases of trying to trace them and then give up for a bit as it's almost impossible. Illegitimacy causes huge problems. One branch ends in 1797 with a baseborn child called William Morse. I can go no further with him. Incomplete records are a nightmare. Kingscote in Gloucestershire has a page missing from the parish register in the 1770s and the BTs for the same period don't give parents' names for baptisms. After a while you're left with a fragmentary tree with only some branches capable of being explored further. Then there's the question of getting the stage where you're just adding names and branches. I don't feel personally that a branch on the periphery of my tree is as interesting to me as one that's closer to the main trunk!