Rather obsessed!

[MollyC]

I had forgotten about this.  I bought a map in a 2nd-hand bookshop.  Then I put a postem in FreeBMD against the death in 1987 of Arthur Kelsey Bown b1891, but his birth record was not found there.

Just had a look at the 1911 census.  Father & step-mother born Sutton in Ashfield, Notts, but 3 children from first marriage born in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, then 2 more at Sutton in Ashfield.
By 1921 Arthur was a teacher in Sheffield.  Another postem is called for, but then I will exit the rabbit hole!

Amended

[Top-of-the-hill]

  I have almost ground to a halt on family history (I became rather obsessive about 10 years ago) but I dive down a lot of rabbit holes after the ancestors of other local residents. Then I come up and wonder what on earth I have been doing.

[Ayashi]

On the obsessed vain I once took a bit of a gamble for a friends birthday present.

My mother had mentioned multiple times that she was interested in finding out what her father did during the war. She knew broad bits, but not details. I applied from the MoD (I got my aunt to sign as next of kin in secret) and 11 months later, in time for the following Christmas to the one I'd intended it for, I gave the paper stack to mum. She wrinkled her face in disgust and confusion and said "what is all this?!"

Thankfully once she realised what it was, she forgot about the tv show she was watching and delved into it 

[Viktoria]

I thought it would be nice to do the family history of  the  family with whom I lived as an evacuee ,they were most kind and I never lost contact with them.
Then something emerged ,one had been adopted through The Methodist Church .
I was pretty sure it was not common knowledge , and seemed to have been done via a society to help “ fallen women”.
At that point I stopped and went no further.
I did not divulge what I had found ,thinking that it really was not my business
and as I wanted it to be a nice surprise I had not asked permission .
I did give the family details  of sites which would be useful if they ever decided to search for themselves.
I have never mentioned it to the family.
Viktoria.

[DianaCanada]

And I thought I was the only one!
A few weeks ago I was thinking about a university friend of mine who died quite young. I knew her parents’ names and was able to go back a few generations in Canada. It made her memory stronger.

[brigidmac]

I'm DNA obsessed
Any time a see a post with someone who has a brick wall not too far back
I check if the surnames are in any of the matches to DNA kits that I manage.

I rarely check for famous surnames.
But occasionally I check friends surnames to see if we could be a DNA match . I'm a distant match to one of my sister's friends on our Scottish side but turned out to also match her husband on our Jewish side !

[Gan Yam]

I did it once with a work colleague, but not as a family tree but to show how easy it could be to find things out about people and information commonly used for identification purposes ie mothers maiden name, and how that may leave you open to fraud.

I told her that I would be able to find her maiden name, parents names, and possibly a little about her grandparents in a very short time, but  all I knew about her was her married name, husbands forename and her children's names.

Luckily she was local and within a short time (lunch break) I was able to tell her where she had married, her maiden name, who her parents were and when they had married, her mother's approx. birth date and where she was born, brothers and sisters, maternal grandparents along with a couple of census'. Her father was Scottish, so that would have taken a lot more delving!

My work colleague was surprised just how much info was so readily available!!

[coombs]

I was sidetracked when researching Inkpen surnamed people as I have an ancestor called William Inkpen born c1720-1740 and was living in Oxford in 1765 as a college servant and later a publican. His surname is usually Dorset or Sussex and he cannot be traced prior to 1765 so far, when he married in Oxford as a bachelor, and the licenses says he was "21 and over".

Being sidetracked in my Inkpen search I found a poor law record on FindMyPast where an Elizabeth Inkpen gave a statement in 1756 in Westminster about her sister Susannah Inkpen now a "lunatic" who was once a servant at St John Zachary in Westminster. The only known baptism I can find that can fit is of a Susan Inkpen in 1729 in Hartfield, Sussex, and she did have a sister Elizabeth. A Susan Inkpen died in 1822 in Hartfield aged 93, pointing to a 1729 birth, but not 100% sure it is the same woman, it could be a Mr Inkpen married a Susan and she lived in Hartfield.

[coombs]

And trawling through the 1930 US census scans of the original documents for certain streets and buildings in Upper West Side in Manhattan, NY, I found the actual enumeration date varied between the 9th April 1930 and 21st April 1930, when actual census day was 1st April 1930.

For those aforementioned buildings in Upper West Side in Manhattan, some apartment blocks were enumerated 3 weeks after April 1st, the date the census was. Yet interestingly Wikipedia has a sample of the 1930 US census for LA, California, showing Walt Disney there, and it was enumerated on the 2nd April 1930, a day after the census.

I guess that enumeration date was the day the enumerator came to collect the forms. If it was 2 weeks after the census date, it could possibly explain missing families in a certain census. For example, a family filled the forms out on 1st April but were away when the enumerator came to collect the forms.