There is a storm coming. The temperature has dropped, and the snow shovels have been taken out of storage. The snow blower is setup on the back porch. I’ve fueled it up and test started it. I’ve cursed myself for not buying some salt to toss onto the sidewalk in the morning. Even though my children anticipate a potential day off from school, to me I just forecast more effort to get to work.
Amongst the distraction of the pending shift in weather, I am still working on multiple adoptee and birth parent searches. These efforts are a stark contrast to the daily tasks and responsibilities about to accumulate on my driveway and sidewalks. In many ways I wish it were as easy as clearing away snow to reveal the truth to my adoptee brothers and sisters, but there is just no way to rush through genealogy without creating a mess of things.
I sometimes stop grinding trees and start a new one where a name and the adoptees non-ID just come so close to alignment that I just cannot brush it aside. I’ll spend a few hours building out the family around these people fallen from the pages of some census record. Then after about four or five dozen people I may try and align this new petri dish to try and stand amongst real surnames from the genetic evidence I have. These end up becoming distractions from the work I should be doing, but let’s face it, even I need to feel progress even when it can just turn into a delusion.
Sometimes this exercise can turn into a new perspective to reflect on the trees based off genuine genetic ancestors, trying to explore possibilities that just cannot be revealed in census polls and other documentation. However, I still must go back over these exceptions to make sure they actually line up with genuine facts. In some ways I feel as if I am sometimes working on a bonsai tree, as I force branches to go toward the truth I seek. Yet, in the end there is just no way to rush the truth.
Some people have been searching for a few years, while others have been searching for decades. Whatever brought them to my door step and however much ground they feel they have covered, there just takes a certain amount of resilience required to working the trails down every path until one becomes familiar enough to see the maze for what it is. In our case a myriad of human choices, that make up hundreds of relationships, and thousands of lives.
Tomorrow I will clear off the same driveway and sidewalks I have done so over and over throughout the years. Then I will head to work and see what can be accomplished. When evening comes I will pickup where I left off the night before, searching for the beginning to several people’s stories and hoping one day I can reveal that most sought after; their ancestors.