Nowadays I have a fabulous piece of software which can draw out family trees and charts. The functionality that I use most frequently is the ability to search through the index of individuals and navigate around the family relationships to arrive at someone in particular. Looking back, with so much information tidy and accessible in one place, it can be easy to forget the roller coaster route of discovery.
Although my research notes are dated, I haven't written a diary or journal. When stalled on one mystery I may side-track onto another puzzle and therefore be thinking about more than one branch of the family at a time. Indeed, when looking at a new source of information, either in person or online, I will often search it for a range of information whilst I am there and record all the details.
Before the 1901 census data for England and Wales was was released and published I got ready to suck all possible relevant information from it. I made a report of everyone in my family tree file whom I expected to be alive here at the time of that census. The logic was to exclude all people in the family who had already died and all those who had not yet been born, then hope to find a 1901 census entry for everyone else.
My four grandparents were all born between 1904 and 1908, several years after the census to record those living at each address at midnight on Sunday 31 March 1901. The bad news was that I had to wait for the 1911 census data to be released for their names to appear. The good news was that all eight great-grandparents were sure to be in the 1901 census, either already married and starting their family or perhaps not yet married and still with their own parents. In the first case I might discover my grandparent's siblings in the family home and in the latter scenario I could be looking at the household of my great-great-grandparents. I was so excited!
Eventually, with some cross-checking to other sources and despite some name variations, I became reasonably sure that I had the right eight people pinned down, with none inexplicably missing. Somewhat surprisingly, five of them were precisely 20 or 21 years old at the time of that census. The exceptions were one 25 year old and two who were 36 and 37 years old, respectively.
The fact that most of these were young adults living at home with their families meant this census was a rich source of names and information for my hobby. However, there were various questions raised and loose ends in view to keep me busy, never mind the essential step of getting all the households' details recorded on the computer and backed up onto floppy discs.