"Hal Moments:" What Malcolm in the Middle Can Teach Us About Focus in Genealogy

Hal Wilkerson is the lovably lost husband and father figure in the hit 2000s TV show Malcolm in the Middle. While he embodies a number of problematic stereotypes typical of husbands and fathers written for TV shows of that era (seeming incompetence, often needing his wife to tell him what to do and how to parent correctly…), he clearly loved his family and he really tried to do his best. There is one particular scene from Season 3, Episode 6, depicting some of his challenges which my husband and I reference quite often. 

There’s a lightbulb burned out in the house. Hal goes to replace the bulb and notices that the shelf holding the replacement bulbs is in need of repair. Distracted from the original task, he sets out to fix the shelf. Fetching a screwdriver for this repair reveals a squeaky kitchen drawer. So naturally, Hal heads to get some grease to fix the drawer. The can of grease in the garage is nearly empty, so he decides to pop over to the hardware store to replace it. When he gets in the car to run this errand, the car starts with a strange noise. A car repair is a high priority problem, so Hal gets to work there. After this, his wife (Lois) comes home and nicely asks him if he could replace the lightbulb that originally started this seemingly endless series of interrupted household maintenance quests. Poor Hal, tired and frustrated, responds to her question from underneath the car shouting, “What does it LOOK like I’m doing?!” (Obviously he was working on the car in order to change that lightbulb!)

In my family, we call this a “Hal moment.” A Hal moment is when you start one task which then requires another, which inspires another, and another, until eventually you find yourself working on something completely unrelated, leaving a trail of partially completed tasks in your wake. This happens to me a lot when I’m cleaning the house. And it happens even more often in genealogy. 

How often do you go looking for something simple, like a birth record or a death date for your ancestor, only to realize later that you’ve been on Ancestry for three hours without finding what you came for, and now you’ve fallen down a proverbial rabbit hole looking at multiple census records trying to figure out the nationalities of your spouse’s grandfather’s first wife’s parents? I have a strong hunch that this sounds familiar to someone besides me. 

May I offer a simple solution? Keep a Genealogy To Do list. Whenever you’re doing some research and you see a shiny object that catches your attention, write it down. Don’t let it distract you. Keep working on your original objective and come back to the shiny thing later. 

Suppose you’re looking for the dates of birth for your great-great-grandparents. You see a census record for them which lists children who you don’t have in your tree? Excellent! Note the year of the census and come back for the kids later. Because if you’re anything like me, you won’t want to stop after you’ve added them to the tree. You’ll start seeing hints with their spouses and children and their birth and death dates, and of course you’ll need to capture that information too! You’ve found an obituary that mentions this great-great-grandpa was a landowner? Way cool! Make yourself a note to go look at the county land records later, because they might contain a wealth of interesting information, but they probably won’t be the best records to tell you exactly when he and his wife were born, especially if you haven’t finished searching for their vital records. Staying focused on the records that will best answer your original question (When were these two individuals born?) allows you to find important information and prevents you from leaving a trail of half-answered questions and forgotten insights as you randomly click around Ancestry (or your research site of choice), like poor Hal wandering through the house from project to project, not actually getting anything done at all.

This To Do list can be kept anywhere. Maybe you’ve got a notebook or a bullet journal where you keep track of your genealogy. Maybe you’re a spreadsheet person. (I can’t resist a good spreadsheet.) If you’re keeping a research log, the end of the log is a great place to stick new questions that arise and additional things to check out later (also known as suggestions for future research). It’s all about what works best for you. Where will you be most likely to actually record all of your tangents and side quests? What will you be likely to reference later to follow up so those details don’t get lost in the shuffle?

Personally, I like Ancestry’s My To-Do List widget. I do most of my research and tree work on Ancestry, so I love that this widget is readily accessible on the homepage. Because it’s online, I can access it anywhere to see what I have to do and I can add something any time a task or research question pops into my head. Here’s a snip of my current list:

(If you don’t have this widget on your Ancestry homepage, you can add it with the Customize your homepage button at the top right:)

FamilySearch has more recently added a comparable widget to their homepage, if that suits your preferences:

Wherever and however it’s kept, my To Do list is invaluable because I don’t forget to go back to investigate all of those interesting leads. Whenever I’ve got some downtime for my family history and I don’t have a specific, burning question demanding in-depth research, I can pick a task from my list. Some of them are questions that will require some digging, while others are tasks that will only take me a few minutes—unless I find new shiny objects in the process…