I am at the halfway point of my 30X30 Challenge. I started the challenge on 01/03/2018.  The goal of this challenge is to research for 30 minutes a day for 30 days for one particular ancestor.  I picked my 2X great grandfather Jake Skipper.  I decided on him because I know very little about him. And in the past I when I didn’t find any new information on him, I would just give up and not research anymore.  So I wanted to know if this is truly a genealogy brick wall or is my lack of information a result of me being impatient.

I decided my dedicated research time would be when I got home from work around 330pm.  This is the time of the day when the house is quiet without much action going on. I must admit this challenge has been harder than I expected.  The first week went pretty good.  Although I didn’t find any new information on my 2X great grandfather, I was able to retrace my original research steps with the goal of verifying what I already knew.  The second-week frustration and impatience started to set in.  I wasn’t finding any new information.  I couldn’t figure out any new places to research.  One day I just sat and stared at my laptop for 30 minutes wondering what to do next.  Then I remember what my husband always says…Google is your friend.  So I restarted my 30 minutes and entered different search combinations in Google Books.  I was able to find some books about African Americans in Woodruff County Arkansas that are in the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville library including Sharecropping Troubadour and Journey of Hope – The Back to Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s.

This challenge is helping me with my patience and creating outside of the box research techniques.  I had a rough couple of days, but I’m back on track and getting excited about what I am going to find.  I will be spending this weekend at the U of A library looking at the books I have discovered.  And this is why my journey continues…

Click HERE to read about how this challenge started.