Genealogy research can easily become an obsession. Countless hours may be spent just finding basic details about one person. Before you know it, you have pages upon pages of facts and notes all over the room. Hand-drawn family trees are scattered about, and you bookmark every web page you come across that mentions an ancestor's name. The image of every census record you find is copied to a folder on your desktop named "Genealogy", and you soon realize that you have more pictures of census pages than you do of your child's entire life!
And for every ancestor you find information about, you usually have to add two more people (parents) to the list of people to research. The questions and the searching never seem to stop! My solution is to keep a plain, spiral notebook and write down any questions I think of in it, and to follow Stratemeyer's rule: End each chapter with a cliffhanger. What fun is it to find all the answers and leave no cliffhangers? Aren't the cliffhangers what kept us up all night trying to finish a Nancy Drew story? And weren't we so excited when we finished that particular story that we just had to get the next book? So, too, is genealogy research.
Leave each section of the research with a cliffhanger, and you'll be excited to start the next part.
"Mysteries!" Ned exclaimed, turning out the lantern. "Haven't you had enough of them?"
Just like the ending of a Nancy Drew story, so is family genealogy. Once you solve one mystery, there is another waiting for you. And like Nancy, you will never have enough.
*For interesting background information on the Nancy Drew series, check out Melanie Rehak's Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the women who created her from your local library.
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