This evening I worked on a tree that I needed to put aside for a while. It has become one of the most challenging puzzles yet; as the family has strong ties to Hungary. I put a few hours into building out the family tree of a recent third cousin that popped up in the AncestryDNA results a few weeks ago.
It appears as if someone had taken advantage of the discounts recently posed by AncestryDNA and jumped onboard with an already existing genealogical tree they had been working on. Well it was a welcome surprise, to say the least, because our closest cousins up until that point were 2nd to 4th cousins in the DNA results.
I have come back from several important activities in my personal life. Visiting birth family far away, the discoveries I made in my genealogy during my stay, the usual mad dash with preparing for Christmas, and all the responsibilities I must maintain in my regular nine-to-five job.
Setting aside a few hours every other day to help on searches is not always easy to maintain. Also the road trip I made to see birth family created a necessary distraction to add more substantiated growth in my own family tree. I had to put some effort into writing it all down or actually performing the genealogy; otherwise I risked forgetting all that I had learned.
Needless to say, the experience of visiting the area of many of my maternal family was important in many ways I cannot fully share or dignify in just a few sentences. Let us just say there are experiences that help define us throughout our lives and these are ones that I can only hope to help others to attain.
Upon my return to the searches I am involved with, I have either researched or built out some trees, and in others I have even started to build new trees based on other genetically linked cousins yet to be connected into what people have attained. After a thousand or two people in a family tree there just gets a point where the cousins in our DNA results are just not able to be folded neatly into our trees. This is where one can start to build a new pattern of one side being the maternal and the other the paternal side of our birth families.
It is not uncommon to get to the very limits of our tree only to find a way to sometimes connect a second tree we have started. It can certainly happen, although I have only encountered it a few times. When a second tree is started, there is renewed promise that the non-identifying information may present itself to someone here that could not be aligned in the first tree. One never knows what will happen, but it helps to keep a constructive attitude moving forward.