Drawing a line and giving up - can I?

[Norfolk Nan]

Sorry - withdrawn

[David Nicoll]

Hi, I appreciate you have withdrawn your question, but I would say never. Park it absolutely, but give up no. We are hunters, somewhere out there is the information we are looking for.
When my parents and their parents were looking documents were all we had, that and family stories.
Now we have DNA which proves or refutes those stories.
We can already see that there is the possibility of pushing that DNA knowledge to the next level, but it is not commercially sensible, for whatever reason for the businesses out there.
I wanted 5 years before I managed to make documentary sense of a DNA link, and I have many more to go.
Pause because it is frustrating and complicated, absolutely, but give up never!

[Andrew Tarr]

We are hunters, somewhere out there is the information we are looking for.

Well, that depends on what you may be looking for.  Any originals have to be hardcopy of some sort, which may simply not exist.  It must have been kept or archived somewhere, and hopefully appeared on line this century.  And after all that, it must have been indexed so that you can trace it, and (finally) recorded correctly (and honestly) in the first place.

EDIT  -  one of my bugbears is looking for things in FindMyPast's newspaper archive.  I find that my 4-letter surname is 'found' so often as something almost totally different, because of splotchy images, that I can't help thinking that true occurrences are similarly indexed as something else - and I shall never catch them ....

Still confident or hopeful ? 

[Norfolk Nan]

Thanks for the comments both!

I agree - I love the hunt of research and the thrill of tracking something down, the more obscure the better.  I also agree that what I'm after may not exist. That's the problem.  How many days, weeks, years do we go over the same ground, double checking, hoping new records are now available and pushing a little bit more in a different direction because that might provide the golden nugget? When do we say 'enough, it doesn't exist' and draw the line?  That means no more progress into the past.  The family tree can't be pushed any further from this point?  I will always wonder if I'd failed or had actually done enough.  These are my prime branches, they mean a lot and DNA isn't helping so there's another doubt hovering. Drives you mad, doesn't it 

[Biggles50]

Park issues rather than beating oneself up.

Time is a great healer, it gives ones grey cells time to refresh and be stimulated by other activities.

It also gives time for other sources to become available, for stones to be overturned.

It is coming up to the festive when there will be an abundance of little boxes of DNA test kits given as presents which means come Match next year there will be a flurry of new DNA matches which may then give the sledgehammer present to you to attack that brickwall.

It took me 5 years to track down my Sister but I did it.

Despite researching for 20 years and 8 years after a DNA test the 3xGGF is still unknown, maybe just maybe next year one of his descendants will have taken a DNA test as a Christmas present.

[coombs]

Never totally give up, even if you leave some ancestors on a backburner. As said though with many lines, gaps in PR's, no wills left, and they were not poor enough to come under the poor law will leave less written records, and it can be virtually impossible to trace back any further.