What do you do when you get stuck or lose interest in your research at least temporarily? We have talked about this before, haven’t we. Sometimes just leave it alone for a while but how do you get reconnected or remotivated?

In the Beginning Genealogy Class we just had there were several suggestions:

1. Start writing the story that your family history research tells up to this point. If you don’t like to write, you can use things like Storied.com or Memories (part of Ancestory.com).
2. Go to someplace like Historyhub.history.gov (connected to NARA). It is a “research support community for everyone, including genealogists, historians, & citizen archivists” where you can ask general questions and get help for your research questions. There is a similar group of WikiTree called G2G where you can ask more specific questions about your family research and get suggestions on what to look for and where. (I recently did this and they had suggestions of places to call or write or visit.
3. Historypin.com is a Pinterest type site for history where you can build stories, see photos, see old photos of locations with new ones to compare.
4. Someone suggested finding a novel that is set in the time and place of your family research and just relax and read to paint a general picture of the life at the time and place of your ancestors.

The main thing is to have a plan. What are you trying to find? What do you know and what do you want to know and where might you look for it? Learn about the history, society, terrain, boundaries, etc that might give you additional ideas about where to look or where people might have come from. I have tried this and found it interesting to see for example that many of the people in the area may have come from the same general area in Europe or may give clues as to what religion they practiced or why they came. I found a 3x GG born perhaps in Guernsey Co, Ohio and married in Wheeling, Ohio Co, Virginia (now W. VA). When I researched these locations, I found that Guernsey Co, Ohio is part of the greater Wheeling Metropolitan Area which includes Wheeling and Elm Grove, Ohio, W. VA where some lived and were buried in the Presyterian Cemetery. And yes, Guernsey gets its name from the Isle of Guernsey in the English Channel. None of this proof of anything for my family but interesting and possibly hints to research. By the way, I read a novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows about the area during WWII.

The other way to get reconnected and motivated is to take classes, perhaps at HQRL. Ireland is coming next week and Social History and Missouri in June. Don’t forget the connection with other family history enthusiasts when you take classes or come to HQ.

See you at the next class as we all get reconnected and learn.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com