The work is never done... Where to focus next?

 When I started working on my family tree, I worked systematically, methodically, upward on every branch, following the male lineage as far as I could.  That was an easy way to start and was pretty quick moving.  When it came to certain branches where I was finding a lot of information, I would sometimes focus on a particular family or line to fill out more information.  That was years ago, and I am still working on my family tree.  I believe that I could work on this for the rest of my life and still have unanswered questions and empty branches.  

Now, however, my tree has a lot more information on it, with about 1200 people, 820 pictures, 10,000+ records and I know a lot more about my ancestors than I ever did.  But when you have this vast of a tree, and you're not in the middle of a certain family, how do you know where to focus your efforts next?  If I'm completely honest, the tactic varies depending on how I am feeling at the time.  Generally though, I follow one of these paths:

1. I use Ancestry to store and organize my tree (there are many different apps available out there, find what works for you), and it provides you with hint leaves about your ancestors.  When I'm looking for a place to start, I will often open the tree and look for a patch of people who have leaves on their profiles and then head to them to review this section of the tree.  Chances are, I'm going to get sidetracked into digging into a certain person or family, but it's given me a good place to start.

   

   Example of a section with a lot of leaf hints

2.  Sometimes, there's a culture or a region that I feel more keen to study up on - for example, I have roots in Germany, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, various points around the US and I'm sure there are some countries that I haven't even discovered yet.  I spent a good 6-8 months working my way around the Czech records because I was fascinated by their culture and I wanted to learn more.  This included much more learning than just obtaining records, much of my time was also spent learning about their cultures and migrations.

3. While I think the electronic sites are amazing, sometimes I don't feel it gives you a very good sense of how far back you are on certain lines.  I want to try to take each line back as far as I can, so a good strategy might be writing out how far back each one goes, maybe a radial chart?  Turn to the section that needs to go farther back to meet the other lines.

4. Sometimes, I like to go through the "images" section of the hints on Ancestry.  Sometimes you find some interesting pictures that will lead you to want to look into that person or area of your family tree.  

This isn't an all inclusive list of where you should focus your research next - but just some ideas about what you could do if you are feeling overwhelmed and don't know where to look for your next breakthrough!