Where has the time gone (and have I lost my mind)?

Well well well.....here I am again with another year between posts.  I'm rather disappointed in my blogging prowess.  I'm not even sure if anyone will see my posts anymore but I still want to blog so I will try to do better.  My biggest issue has been my working with my tree at ancestry.com.  It seems that every time I'm on my laptop I find myself working on that instead of pretty much anything else.  How big of a problem was that?  In my very first blog post (13 days shy of 5 years ago) I wrote that I had been working on my tree for 22 years and had 44,993 people in my tree.  Where am I today, 5 years later?

Yep, in the last 5 years I've added 62,902 people to my tree.  I've also now sourced/added almost a quarter of a million records from ancestry's little "shaky" leafs.  When I started blogging I wasn't using that ancestry feature so that's 50k/year that I've matched up.  This has obviously kept me quite busy.  So why am I on here posting tonight?

Xfinity sent me an iPad last month as part of a promo.  I'm not an Apple guy but I wanted a tablet so I thought I'd give it a shot.  I've explored the iCloud and decided that is a pretty good deal and would be great for allowing me to make my genealogy information mobile.  I didn't want to move my genealogy folder into the iCloud until I finished organizing my files so I decided to let my ancestry.com and newspapers.com subscriptions lapse so that I could accomplish that.  This is where I think I may have lost my mind........

I had almost 1000 files (obits, death certificates etc) on my laptop that needed to be renamed and sorted.  I got that done and then found a folder that I forgot about on my thumb drive that had almost 1700 more files that needed to be renamed/sorted.  I opened a few and I didn't even recognize the names.  I have been feeling overwhelmed by how large this project is and this put me over the edge.  I decided that most of these files I've downloaded are available digitally and that all of this renaming and sorting is just draining and is sucking the joy out of working on my tree.  So I started deleting..........

I deleted all birth/marriage/death records that weren't for my DIRECT ancestors or their siblings.  I went into my census records file and did the same thing (deleted 5 gigs worth of data in this folder alone).  I then went into my obituaries folder and I have over 7000 files in there - 7000!  I started doing the same thing there and hope to finish that tomorrow.  I realize that the digital files aren't guaranteed to be there forever, let alone tomorrow but I also realize that almost all of the files in these folders are files that I downloaded, labeled and then never opened again (and probably never will).  I also know where to find them if I decide I need them again someday.  

I'm a big proponent of doing the ancillary lines.  My last blog post pointed to a very distant DNA match that may have helped solve a brick wall but I'm tired and I need a break.  I want to get back to my main lines and I think this is the start I need to get me there.  I plan to blog a lot more as part of this process.  Wish me luck!