New Year, New Tree

I've been working on this obsession hobby of mine now for 15 years or so.  Seeing that number in black & white and associated with my research strikes me with awe.  When I started climbing this tree of ancestors I thought it would be a quick project, I'd go back to Adam & Eve (or at least Noah) in a matter of a couple of months, figure out how everybody on the planet was related and hang up my completed and flawless tree and be done with it.  Little did I know that brick walls can appear as early as just a few generations back, the stories would feed a desire to know every little detail available, there would be mysteries to solve and that people you'd never meet could hold such a huge place in your heart (not to mention the book shelves which are now stuffed with documents, photo albums, and historical texts).  It's hard to explain to an outsider the desire to match every name to a face (or in the case of unlabeled photographs the faces to the names), to make sure that nobody in the family goes forgotten no matter how seemingly insignificant their life was or seems.  This little adventure has resulted in a HUGE tree.  I'm talking thousands upon thousands of names, each with dates and locations and notes.  To paraphrase Will Parker from Oklahoma I've gone about as fer as I can go and have been giving myself concussions on brick walls that just won't budge.  While attempting to chip away at these walls I've helped my cousin in law work on her family tree with 4-H, I've started helping my sister in laws husband find his birth family, I've been sorting DNA results (p.s. if you have tested and are willing to share please send me an e-mail) & finding and meeting lots of new cousins/relatives.  In the course of growing the tree I've found a good number of sources and have learned a lot from people who look at my 15 years of research and can still call me a rookie.  One of the tips I have received is now that I have mastered logging my sources, understand primary and secondary sources, have a firm grasp on what can be the useful details, how to work with the tiniest clue, etc that I should go back to square one.  Start over.  Retire my tree and plant new seeds and see if what grows is the same.  Of course I'll be working with the same people so hopefully I will arrive at the same conclusions but I've already found a number of new details on close relatives, new leads and trivia and have some of the thrill of the hunt back instead of being more of a caged researcher held in by my brick walls.  I'm working very hard to water and feed this new baby tree and hope to have it thriving soon but not only is this a new tree from seed but I am no longer working on my dinosaur of a program so I have the learning curve/challenge of a new program and laptop.  I'm hoping that while I nurture this little sapling, the fire inside me will continue to be fanned and I'll be soaring to new heights on the limbs of this tree. In the mean time I hope you will allow me to bore you with my research notes, the little oddities I am uncovering and the notes from interviews.  It might be a while before this blog goes back to looking like what it was originally and honestly it might never return that way again.  It might stay as your little window into the terrifying world of ancestors with intertwined branches but I hope in the process of looking into my mind you will get a glimpse of your ancestors and the interesting lives they led.  So here's to seeing what comes from Tree 2.0 and 2019!  :-)