Writer's Block

Image from Pixabay.com

I have not written anything recently because I don’t know what to write. I’ve been having real problems with my genealogy research this summer. I previously explained my problems with the research into Mariah Williams Bailey Huber in a post in April. Then I moved on to my mother’s Schneider roots. There are a lot of Snyder’s/Schneider’s in her family, as at the level of my second great-grandparents John Snyder/Schneider married Katherine Snyder/Schneider (as far as I can tell at this point, two different Schneider family lines joining). I have an old hand-drawn family tree of names & relationships, which has proven to be about 85% accurate, which goes to my third great-grandparents level in the Snyder families; it stops where I am stuck. It is at the point of my second great-grands and third great-grands that the Schneider’s emigrated from the Germanic states (pre-Germany) to the USA. I have been having a great deal of difficulty trying to find anything on their emigration and on their life before reaching the United States. It doesn’t help that Schneider is a fairly common name. I am finding records, but I can’t tell if they belong to my people.

It’s gotten to the point where I have determined that I either need to pay a German genealogist to look into this or take some courses in German genealogy and perhaps learn German. I priced hiring German genealogists and determined that that is not on the current budgetary horizon. (It’s not that I think that they are overpriced. Apparently, it is standard to buy a chunk of hours’ worth of work [20, 40, 120] for a set price, and while that price was initially a bit breathtaking, once I divided it by the number of hours I realized it’s really quite reasonable for the expertise needed and work involved. It’s just not something I can consider until possibly spring, or later.) And, I don’t have the time to take webinars or classes in German genealogy, and German, for at least three years.

However, I have found it psychologically difficult to move on without writing without writing a blog post on them. Apparently, my mind and gut have been convinced over the years of doing the research and writing this blog, that when I have completed what I’m able to do on a given ancestor at that point in time, I write a blog post before moving on to whichever line I choose to explore next. The blog posts I normally do on ancestors situate them in the historical context in which they lived and involve a decent amount of contextual research to do so (in my head I call them “ancestor profiles”). The problem is, I don’t know enough about the Schneider’s to do that – hence the writer’s block. But I have to do something so I can get my head to move on (I’m tired of nights of only 4 hours of sleep in which I find nothing helpful). So I have decided to write a few posts that I will deem “status reports,” writing about what I do know about the ancestor and/or family I’m stuck on, and, where there are differing indications that I’ve seen in other’s trees explain why I have not accepted those points (… yet). I’m hoping that those sort of posts will serve two purposes: (1) allow me to let go and move on to research another line, and, (2) perhaps attract the attention of a “cousin” I may not have met yet who has more information than I have, or different family stories that might point to more clues, who is willing to help me get further back on these lines.