Learning Patience as I complete by KDP

Spring Break has come and gone and I didn’t make my goal of having the rough draft of my Kinship Determination Project (KDP) completed.  I’m not complaining, though, as three events occurred that threw me into a tizzy!

First, less than a month ago, I received 30+ years of a diary written by the sister-in-law of one of the individuals I’m writing about.  It is a genealogical gold mine!  After reading and rereading I took notes based on individuals and then by types of events.  Spent the last three weeks incorporating the information into the KDP as it was quite useful and enhanced the paper.  Long term plan is to create an index of the diary for future use.

Second, our desktop system bit the dust.  I had my work saved in numerous places so that wasn’t awful but instead of a double screen I was back using (and sharing) an old laptop.  Really slowed the process down. 

Last, I had changed my mind about taking a trip during my week’s vacation and instead, I had decided to spend that week working on the paper.  Plans changed when my husband fell off the roof.  Miraculously, he’s fine, however, we spent the week quite differently than expected. 

Since he’s okay, a co-worker’s son was able to recover the data on our crashed system and the new information I added gave the paper more character, I’m fine with not meeting my goal.  My revised plan was to finish by the end of March, put it away for the month of April, check out the portfolios that will be available at the upcoming NGS conference in Ft. Lauderdale, revise through June and after taking one more trip through the archives to make sure that I left no stone unturned, submit in July.  Well, it's the last day of the month and I'm not done.  I'm still waiting for six records to arrive that apply to the last generation. Have to read through about 100 handwritten letters that are 100 years old to mine for details.  New goal is mid April completion. That's only obtainable if I work all day the next 3 weekends, spend at least 2 hours a night during the week AND get the records.  Genealogy is definitely a study in patience!