After all this time, I finally feel like things are back on track for myself. I ended up scrapping all of my original work for my project, and ended up starting fresh. Turns out, that was the best possible thing I could’ve done, because I no longer feel stuck! I think I’m roughly 15 pages deep now, and yet still I have so much more to say and write about. It also kind of helps that I’ve been making a lot of progress with uncovering historical documents as well as photos from my family’s past.
With my parents’ help, they let me go through all the old family photos we have, and I ended up stumbling across photos going all the way back to my great-great-grandparents on both sides of the family. It was honestly kind of cool, because I was getting to learn so much more about my own parents in the process.
I’ve also heard back from one of the WWII archives I reached out to, called the Arolsen Archives, an international center that specializes in tracing data and history of those persecuted by the Nazi’s. When I had used the site myself, I had only found one or two papers that my family already had access to; however, after submitting a request form for them to search for my grandfather’s name, they came back to me rather quickly with several more documents that no one in my family had ever seen. It actually helped me to confirm some timelines around my grandfather’s escape from a concentration camp (still trying to find confirmation on what camp it was), with him being 17 at the time.
As of right now, I am currently working through creating a comprehensive list of the deities worshipped both in the past as well as modern day in Lithuania. This has probably taken me the longest out of any of the writing thus far because of just how extensive and convoluted the history of this culture is. Since paganism isn’t important to modern England and hasn’t been a thing for a long time, I think I’ll just briefly mention it when I get to it before focussing more on the Christianity within the culture.
I think I might end up taking a break from the writing aspect for a bit just to start labeling and organizing my visual data. I just need to decide how I want things to go. But for right now, that’s pretty much it. I know I’m in the home stretch, but it doesn’t quite feel like that yet. I just need to push through and make it to the finish line.