Genealogist Finally Reaches Year 1600, Realizes She Has No Idea What to Do Now

Longtime genealogist Constance Pedigree, who has spent 20 years tracing her family line backward through time, announced Tuesday that she has definitively documented a direct ancestor living in 1603, achieving the goal she set for herself in 2006. She reports feeling 'nothing.' 'I thought I'd cry,' Pedigree said, staring at a photograph of a parish register entry for one Thomas Whitmore, baptized in Staffordshire in 1603. 'I've been working toward this for two decades. Fourteen verified generations. I found Thomas. He's real. He was baptized. I have the record. And I feel... empty.' Pedigree's research, which spans hundreds of archival visits, thousands of digitized records, and three trips to England, has produced a family tree of remarkable depth and verification. Each generation is supported by at least two independent primary sources, a standard of evidence she describes as 'obsessive but defensible.' The problem, Pedigree explains, is that Thomas Whitmore of Staffordshire is effectively a dead end. Records before 1600 in his parish are fragmentary, unindexed, and in several cases physically damaged. 'There's no further back to go,' she said. 'Thomas is the wall. Not a brick wall -- a real wall. The records don't exist. He's the end of the line. And I don't know who I am without a line to research.' Pedigree's husband reports that she has been 'wandering around the house looking lost' since the breakthrough, opening genealogy websites and then closing them, and organizing her research files with what he describes as 'a melancholy thoroughness.' 'She alphabetized the filing cabinet twice,' he said. 'She's never alphabetized anything willingly in her life.' Fellow genealogists have suggested she begin researching collateral lines -- siblings, cousins, and in-laws of her direct ancestors. Pedigree has acknowledged this as 'a reasonable suggestion' but says it 'doesn't have the same gravitational pull as the direct line.' She has, however, begun studying Latin, noting that several pre-1600 records in neighboring parishes are in ecclesiastical Latin and 'might, if I squint and learn a dead language, contain another generation.' 'There might be a Thomas before Thomas,' she said, with the first sign of energy she has displayed in a week. 'I just need to learn to read 16th-century church Latin. How hard can it be?'