A New Way of Looking at Brick Walls

So I have several brick walls in my tree, some of which I have little chance of getting past any time soon, maybe ever. But I keep looking in hopes of finding something I haven't before, and keep attempting to look at them from different angles.

Then my computer died late last year, so my parents got me a new computer for my birthday, along with Office Suite 2010. Included in the package was a program I'd not used before, called OneNote. Up to now, I'd been using Office XP, so I'd not had it available. I looked online to see what it was all about, and was surprised at how well it fit my thought-processes. The sub-pages and in-line links and tags made the pages so much more graphically appealing than when using Word or Excel. It just seemed like it might be able to do things for me I wouldn't be able to do with the other two programs. Or at least, not quite as easily.

So I played around with it, both for my writing and for my genealogy. For genealogy, I set up a new file for each, and a general-purpose set of pages for my overall research, which included pages for my brick walls. I knew the first few people who were my brick walls so well, I was able to do much of the info off the top of my head. I included clippings of photos if I had them, and maps if I knew locations, and a list of the facts about the person. Then I realized I could include a list of where I'd gotten the facts from, and was astonished to see how many I had for some, and also how few (though that was less surprising) for others.

Because of all this, I decided it might be fun to write this all out in some sort of biographical format and include that list, and a list of the basic info sources I still need to find, just so it's out there and everyone can see.

So starting next week, I will post a piece on one brick wall person on Friday night. Please, if you know these people, or have them in your tree somewhere, or think you might have, or more importantly, if you think you have some information not included in these posts, do contact me. Either here in a comment or through my email address, which I believe is available on my other Blog. I'll be starting with those 5 generations before me, and working back to those 7 generations before me. Anything before that would be too difficult to trace at this time, and I'd like to focus on the ones I'm nearest related to.

Looking forward to this. I think it will be fun to write out. I certainly hope that it will be interesting to read.