NOTE: I accepted the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge headed by fellow genealogy blogger Amy Johnson Crow in January 2023. The idea behind this challenge is that you will receive email prompts, a word or phrase, every week, and you find something about your research or family history to write about.  I write in a journal about all the prompts, but I blog about at least one prompt a month.  Click HERE to read about how I have incorporated this challenge in my blogging.

Brick wall in genealogy is defined as tough research problems, apparent dead-ends that after many hours of searching still yield no answers. In many ways I feel like this has been the case during most of my research. Researching my family history has not been easy. As a matter of fact it has been quite difficult for many reasons.

There are still ancestors that I have been researching from the beginning of this journey that I still have the exact same information on, including my grandfather, Booker Mays; my great grandfather, Oscar Wright, my 2X great grandfathers John Denson and Jake Skipper; my 2X great grandmother, Nancy Blue Heck; and my 3X great grandfather, Tilman Ward. Sometimes I think I haven’t spent enough time researching them. Then I think they lived so long ago that there are probably not records about them, at least not the records that I’m used to using in my research.

With the exception of my great grandfather, Oscar, all of them lived in other states than Arkansas. This is where my research outside of Arkansas starts, and that maybe some of my problem. I’m very familiar with Arkansas, the repositories, the history, and communities that my ancestors lived in. So, it has been fairly easy for me to pack up my backpack and go research whenever I want in Arkansas. But I just can’t just grab my backpack and go to Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee or Missouri when the genealogy research spirit hits me. Because of that I’m going to have to learn more about Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Missouri and the record collections that are available online. I’m also going to have to learn more about slavery, reconstruction, and the laws of the late 1800s and early 1900s when it comes to African Americans in those states as well since that is the time period my ancestors lived in those states.

These brick wall ancestors will be the focus of my research for the next six months. So hopefully, I will have made a little progress in learning more about their lives and families by this time next year. Wish me luck.

Click HERE to read 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2019 – Brick Wall