For the past 7 or 8 months I have been back to digging into my ancestry.
by goodvibrations/Stocksy
I had given this research up in the late 20-aughts because I felt I had fully explored everything available and had reached a dead-end. The proverbial “brick wall”. I was tired of the blood running in my eyes as I battered at the wall and got nowhere. I had been using Family Tree Maker and even that program had been sold so many times and not updated or maintained. All roads pointed to “give it up”.
I packed away about 4 full crates of research. Between 1996 and 2010 I printed everything I found on line for all the lines of my family – paternal and maternal. Reams of paper. I’m glad now that I did because a lot of what I am finding in these four crates is not necessarily available today. There are emails from folks I was reaching out to via bulletin boards and forums. There are lists upon lists of information from a site called RootsWeb.
I knew I had packed all this into crates, but it did seem elusive. in 2021 my husband and I acquired a storage area in the bottom of the property our condo is in. It is down a long narrow flight of stairs into a sub-basement. We had moved a lot of boxes as well as his hobby: steam trains equipment (Gauge 1) to this lockup. I mentioned several times I wanted to go down there to him. I always got “The Look”. This past weekend a younger friend came to visit and she accompanied me to the lock-up. She carried the four crates up and helped me bring them to a more accessible location.
While a lot of the information in these four crates related to many lines of my ancestry, the first crate I opened looked to be entirely my maternal line. I reached in and under the top pile just to see what else might be there and came out with three printed emails from 25 years ago. They were related to my paternal ancestry which I had decided to focus on through 2026. It is amazing these papers were so buried and yet they were the first papers I put my hands on.
This whole week has been about finding those three people, reaching out via old email addresses, searching social media and using all search engines to attempt to find them again. Also using Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com to send messages.
This entry is the first one I will be using to document this experience of re-discovery of my paternal ancestry, i.e. McCrystal/McCristle/McChristal and all the other spellings I am finding.
I’m very excited by these discoveries and hope to flesh out my 2X Grandfather, James McCristle, who came from Ireland to marry my 2X grandmother, Mary Ann White (nee Taylor) a widow with two children in Mercer County, Kentucky in August 1853. I hope by the end of this year to be able to write the story of his adventures and those of his descendants.
I will be adding future articles that document my adventures with AI. I chose to use Claude.ai for my initial dive into using AI to help my ancestry research.