It's detective work with most of the witnesses long dead. You'll spend evenings deep in census scans and parish records, build momentum across three generations, then hit a wall where a name is misspelled, a courthouse burned, or a great-grandmother simply vanishes from the paper trail.

The dead ends are constant and genuinely maddening.

But cracking one open, finding the immigration record or the marriage that links two branches, delivers a quiet, almost ancestral jolt that keeps you up far too late.