Post Delayed

I'm sorry for the delay in getting up a 52 Ancestors post this week. I expect it will go up Saturday - after I have a chance to write it.

This past weekend and this week I've just felt exhausted and therefore have been going to bed at morning person hours -- and getting up at my normal night person hours (although there was nothing normal about last Saturday when I slept until 1:35 PM!). All this sleep is cutting into my research and writing time (let alone my chores)! Accordingly, I'm behind again.

I've come to the obvious conclusion that I'm not likely to truly get 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks as the challenge goes - I still intend to try, so it's possible, albeit not probable as I've never caught up from my break for moving this summer. I'm still perennially 2-3 ancestors  behind everyone else, and the calendar.

I've decided to spill over into January if necessary but I will finish 52 Ancestor posts (49 will be Grandma Anna Mae Bennett and 50 will be Grandpa Owen Carl Henn), before moving on to whatever this blog turns out to be. I've also decided on a future research/blogging strategy. I read a lot of Genea-blogs (at lunch at work, through Feedly), which is how I've learned how and where to conduct family history research. Therefore I know that one is supposed to pick a branch and proceed until you can't go anymore, but that seems to leave out family/cousin readers. One blog I follow (wish I could remember the name right now, I'd link to it, but...*blank* ...sigh) divides her research into quarters of the year, and spends one quarter of each year on one branch, defining "branch" as rooted from each grandparent. I think I will follow her example and spend three months on each branch [Bennett, Henn, Erwin, Snyder & up from each grandparent to all the other names in that branch] from January on out (including the spillover, if any), for the foreseeable future. If there turns out to be no spillover then the order will change to Erwin, Snyder, Henn, Bennett as I am doing it this year.

Since I know so much more about how to do this than when I started much of this next year will be spent on organization and clean up, before things get out of hand -- much easier to do it one year out than several years later as I see some doing. So I'll go over all I've done so far, making sure that the connections I've made seem sound and getting all my cites to the accepted standard (I bought a book on evidence citation standards for genealogy) -- at least I know that will be somewhat easier for me than some as I DO have cites for every single piece of evidence I found (I'm somewhat fanatical about being able to document and/or cite sources on my work), they just probably aren't to accepted form since I didn't know there was an accepted form until recently. 

I figure about a month to a month and a half on clean up before trying to push forward on each branch. I will also take the time to read some of the history books I've picked up about where my ancestors lived so as to better understand their context. 

I do intend to do more Ancestor Highlights (what I called the bios before the 52 Ancestor challenge), and other posts -- the blog won't go dead. For those relatives concerned I won't have anyone more to write about, 1) I'm just starting grandma Henn (Bennett)'s family (by the way, we come from, or through, a different part of Canada than I was told we did) and 2) Ancestry.com says I have 1405 people in my family tree at the moment --true, that's not all straight up as I find it helps my direct line upward research to research each sibling of each person and their kids for about two generations down -- but they're all relatives and fair game for blogging about, especially the ones who lived through interesting times!