I cannot believe I never did a post in the entire month of February. It might be the shortest month, but it was a busy one genealogywise. 2 genealogy society meetings, plus a great conference put on by the DuPage County GS kept me busy.
The best part of February was making a new family connection with a woman who is in one of my genealogy groups. She in turn introduced me to her cousin. It was through these two that I found out about some Swedish records that had just become available through Ancestry. So why no posting in Feb to talk about my great new find? I was so busy going through the Swedish church records I had no time to blog, or do much of anything else.
It was so exciting to find all these wonderful birth, death, marriage and household examination records going back years and years. The whole deluge of new family members was thrilling, AT FIRST. Then I became just overwhelmed with the sheer number of records and people. What was the best way to search through all this stuff?
I finally just stopped and gave myself a couple of days to think about how to handle this deluge. The ancestors weren't going anywhere and I was going crazy trying to keep everything straight. I decided to work on my direct line one family at a time, first the paternal side, then the maternal side. I will search all the records for a family, then begin again with the next family. I will examine the records as I go for other family and make notes on them, but the research will focus on one family at a time.
Susan Peterson over at LongLostRelatives had a recent post about Ancestor Overload posted as an Open Discussion. Go over and read it. Some great thoughts and ideas on how to handle AO.
