Any plans for a new challenge?

[Merry]

I don't know how I would find brick walls on my tree from a specific place.

[vita]

Originally Posted by Merry

I don't know how I would find brick walls on my tree from a specific place.

I was thinking that too Merry. Personally, I'll be grateful for anything that

gives me the excuse to post details of my couple of brick walls once again.

[Margaret in Burton]

Brick walls definitely.

Ermmmmm. Peter Henry Harrison? Or is he barred.

[Merry]

But don't we just post up our brick walls whenever we like?

The thing with ToG was it encouraged looking at a specific ancestor at a specific time, but "post a brick wall" doesn't encourage me to do anything. I probably have hundreds of brick walls, the majority of which are brick walls for a very good reason!

[Merry]

Originally Posted by Margaret in Burton

Brick walls definitely.

Ermmmmm. Peter Henry Harrison? Or is he barred.

No, he isn't!!

[JBee]

Maybe concentrating on Surnames starting with A and working through each week.

[ElizabethHerts]

I must admit that if I get stuck and encounter a brick wall, whether temporary or permanent, I post a query here to ask for help. I suspect that with my more enduring brick walls I have already asked for help before.

I quite like the idea of focussing on a county. Of course, there will be some in which I have no interest, but we could remind people of what resources there are and that might well help find answers.

Brick Walls sounds good I've got a few

[Janet]

What if we broke the work into slices of time rather than slices of geography? I would enjoy focusing on how best to research in a given time period. It would force me to establish a better timeline and become conscious of exactly when and where my information trail peters out on each line. I expect it would also reveal some insights I have not had before about what was happening in the same time frame on different branches of my tree.

I should think we could date a brick wall by the earliest reliably known date before the trail runs cold. Suppose the only known facts date from 1940 or later; that would be a 1940 brick wall. Maybe some of us have such recent ones. It would be nice to have a week or two of looking at the mid-20th century and really dig into the 1939 Register, directories, electoral rolls, and other sources I'm probably overlooking. In the U.S., the 1940 census for instance.

I'm sure that better brains than mine can come up with useful cutoff points for earlier times. Before and after 1837 would undoubtedly fall under very different research protocols for instance, and there must be other good ways to divide things up. The very act of grappling with the defined sectors of time and seeing how my own brick walls fall within that structure would already start to organize my thoughts. Would that make any sense to other members?

I do find the geographic approach attractive but county by county won't cover everyone. There is also country by country, and county by county or state by state within those. It gets complicated and some poor people might wait forever. Personally I would rather find my ancestors before I become one.

[Merry]

I'm just a bit bothered!

If 20+ people all post a brick wall problem at the same time and then another lot the next week and the next week, who do you think is going to knock down any of them?