A roll of microfilm arrived for me the other day. That is hardly unusual. I really wanted to look at it. Not so unusual either. With a tiny little bit of time, I put the reel on the machine, forwarded it a bit, brought the image in to focus, and guessed where in the reel the item I was looking for might be. I knew pretty well were it should be, and with a motorized machine, it is pretty quick to zip though a film. I took my finger off the forward button. Not quite the right spot but only three frames off. The thought that this might just be the genealogist’s equivalent of archery came to me, and I save some time with a near bull’s-eye. The information I wanted was where I thought it ought to be. I quick press of the scan button, and I had what I wanted on my memory stick. Rewind, return and done.
It sounds good. Focus on what you are looking for, find it, and move on. The problem though, is that though being focused is definitely the way to be as sure as possible of finding what one wants, (there was, after all, a specific reason I had ordered the film) it isn’t the only thing to do. If one can be focused, on can be unfocused too. A few days later, I took another look at that reel for no particular reason except that it might have more information for me.
Researching out of Focus
I found that one man I was interested in owned a boy named Bob, and that the court judged Bob to be nine. I got to wonder what had become of Bob, and what kind of life that enslaved boy led.
I found wife number 3, suing the son of wife number 1, the guardian of a son of wife number 2. Going back in time, I found all the children of wife number 1 suing their father over an inheritance that they were to have gotten from their maternal grandfather when their mother died. Their grandfather had disliked their father and their grandfather’s will made sure that their father was to get nothing, but their father had kept it anyway when his wife died. Their father died about two years after the children sued him. Not so surprisingly, he left nothing to his children by wife number 1. I got to wondering, just why we think modern families are complicated?
There were other interesting things as well. It is a good thing to focus on the goal, the original reason for searching among a set of records is likely to be important. Nevertheless, once the focused work is done, it can be just as good to do some out of focus genealogy. If a set of records have one thing for you, it may have many others. Less obvious, perhaps, but it might not be a good idea to be that they are less important. Every find adds to the pictures we have of our ancestors. Maybe out of focus is the wrong analogy. Those pictures we create of our ancestors don’t become unfocused just because we take a wider look. Maybe a better analogy would be taking the portrait lens off of our camera, putting on a wide angle lens, and making sure we get the whole scene.