© Elena Schweitzer | Dreamstime.com

Genealogy research is a messy endeavor.

I started out with the mantra that my research would be thorough and complete, and that my pedigree chart would only contain the most accurate information available. Somewhere down the road the latter part changed to probably mostly accurate information available. Now, if it looks like it could be good information but needs to be verified, I still add it to my chart because once I move on to something else, I never know when I’ll get back to it to verify. If, in fact, that ever happens because I’m always finding new information and different tangents. One day I may regret not noting that possible connection.

Just call me Alice. My genealogy research has taken a dive into a long, dark, twisty rabbit hole, and at this point I’m not sure when I’m going to see the light of day again.

My collection of information never seemed this messy until I finally uploaded my already robust pedigree chart to Ancestry.com. Part of me was content to just leave it at that, knowing that with 40,000 plus people in my records, I already had a sturdy, well-researched base of information regarding my family history. The problem is those little leaves that shake their booty at you until you click on them, and there were leaves on every single person on my pedigree chart. Could it be that I was really missing that much information from my personal family tree?

The short answer is no, I have almost all of the information I was being teased with by those shaking leaves. In order to know that as a certainty, however, I had to click on each leaf to confirm. One leaf leads to another, and now the OCD part of me won’t be happy until all the fluttering leaves are gone.

That, my friends, is close to impossible. There are tens of thousands of leaves, minimum, and once you accept a hint, it leads to 10 more hints, 10 more leaves, if I’m lucky. Sometimes the hints are double that for particularly well-connected people in my family tree. A perfectionist by nature, I am slowly losing my mind.

Thank you, Ancestry.com, for providing this incredible wealth of genealogy information on your website. Please let me know when you will start paying for my therapy.