The joy and pain of archives: you can spend a day turning old pieces of parchment, squinting at smudged copperplate handwriting, and get nothing.
you can walk into a library, pick a volume of church gazettes almost at random from a daunting 25-year span to be examined, and hit a new reference to your subject on the first page you open it to.
No matter how armed with dates and names, you can flounder in a sea of not very precise filing by some clerk 142 years ago.
and the most frustrating and rewarding: you can be constantly distracted by the flicker of little historical diamonds: stories of nobodies calling out from scraps of papers. For instance: In 1868, Jane Boyd, a "sorrowing widow" from Co. Antrim, Ireland, took the liberty, as she said, of writing to the Victorian Police Commissioner to ask, had he heard of her son John Boyd, last heard of in the Victoria Police, but silent these past years. "I am distressed between hope and despair," she wrote.
And that's the end of it. no report, no record of a reply to Mrs Boyd. Just a woman in Ireland casting out a line to a missing son, suspended.