It's becoming a stamp collection
 

I do enjoy family history, but I'm finding myself doing the tree the Ancestry way: ooh look, another ancestor: snap!

Not only is this ultimately deeply unsatisfying, but it's wrong. I'm contemplating a 1764 marriage in Lincolnshire for a couple whose apparent eldest child is born in Norfolk in 1773. Not impossible, but deeply improbable.

What do you do when research starts to feel trivial?

I usually know I have done enough when I am pleased that people have died before having too many children, so I don't have to add masses of them to my tree.

When this happens I open a bottle of wine!

Ha! My Greens of Gawsworth were very easy to find and I found myself breathing a huge sigh of relief when I finally hit the wall in 1498 and could honestly tell myself it was ok to stop researching them! I became (whisper it) bored with them round about 1665 lol.

OC

Hmm. I think the further away in time they are the less "real" they seem. I am not too bothered at having to stop going further back. But there are some gaps in more close ancestors that I would like to fill.

It's odd though, how I feel an affinity for some more than others. I am fond of my great x 3 grandmother Kezia Seals/Saul/Sales as it took me years to find her baptism and once I'd managed that I could go back several further generations. I felt I'd got the basic facts for her, given her parents and siblings. I was also glad to find a female NOT called Ann, Elizabeth, Mary or Sarah!

I was really hoping that DNA would help fill my gaps in the Irish lines I have got brickwalls but so far nothing has come up.

So many people do DNA tests but don't have trees so have no idea where they match with my trees.

If you aren't enjoying it stop.

I have gone back to my first love local history. I don'the mind that they are not my ancestors.