Genealogy: The Jigsaw Puzzle

I enjoy puzzles. Crossword puzzles, sudoku, logic puzzles. One reason I am a huge fan of Ancestry.com for genealogy is because for me, it is as addictive as Candy Crush is for my friends. Constantly evolving puzzles to solve.

People often imply that doing genealogy is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Here’s how I see that.

Genealogy: The Jigsaw Puzzle

From the picture on the box cover, you can see that this puzzle features YOUR family. There are photos of people you know and people you never met. There are photos of houses, clothes, and cars. There are images of documents pertaining to different family members: birth certificates, death certificates, censuses, tax records, property records, mortgages, wills, school photographs, telephone books, hotel registers, church records, resumés, letters, bible pages, other lineage charts. Wow!

You open the box and spread out the pieces. As you do so, you first notice that there are no “edges” – no straight lines or smooth curves to indicate a border. Hmmm. 

Next, you quickly observe that there is writing and/or images on both sides of every piece. Huh?

The first time you put two pieces together, there is a strange sound in the empty box, and when you look there, you find four more pieces. Sometimes there are even more pieces in there. But never fewer than four. What?

At first, you think, “Great. I’ll leave the new pieces alone because they will extend the puzzle past its borders.” When you try doing the puzzle this way, you end up with a boxful of pieces and many gaping holes in the puzzle as you’ve built it. Clearly, those pieces are central to solving the existing puzzle. Yikes!

You started out by putting together pieces of information that you already know, and then work to fill in information around that. As the puzzle grows, you realize that some of the information on the puzzle pieces is “false” and misleading. Perhaps the names are correct, but dates are way off. Or perhaps the locations are not what they should be. Excruciatingly, the pieces physically fit perfectly, but the data is incorrect. It takes a few errors like this before you begin to mark the incorrect side of the puzzle piece with a big red X. I’ve got this!

As is always the case with jigsaw puzzles, family and friends want to help. While you are cooking dinner, they fill in a few holes with pieces from the box (even though they don’t know or understand the rules of the game). When you return to survey their work, oh the work that needs to be undone! As you remove a piece from the puzzle, three (or more) more pieces randomly fly away. What fresh hell is this?

After working on the puzzle for a few weeks, you realize you need a much bigger table.

After working on the puzzle for a year, you realize that the puzzle will never be complete.

After working on the puzzle for years, you realize that you should have written things down from the beginning, because the puzzle is now so huge you cannot easily see the information at the center.

One thing is certain. If you cannot stop doing ‘this and only this’ puzzle… If you are constantly and consistently working on this puzzle… If you feel you are addicted to this puzzle…

You may be a genealogist.