OK, we are going to say it.... Some family research is not exciting! However, we are going to qualify that by saying, the bits that might seem less fun can actually turn out to be the most exciting as they can solve a few puzzles.
The bits that can seem less exciting are often when you need to write down all your facts and cross reference them. It can be, for example that you have all the birth, marriage and death records for a couple and have found all their children too. You may have also checked some census records and they always seem to live in the same place. It may seem pointless to write down the details from every census but it can be remarkable what you find.
This can be particularly helpful where there has been some unclear handwriting on a record. Perhaps a name that is unclear on one record shows up more legibly in another. This can be of particular importance when it is pre statutory BMD records. There can be little information on church records, especially about women. Maybe you have recorded a marriage and the woman's mother's name is not clear. you take a stab at it but without an accurate name, you can look no further for records. At another time, you record a census record where an unexpected name turns up. By cross referencing, you can check if it relates to the name that was unclear. Even thought the census record should record the relationship with the head of the household, it is very common for these to be recorded incorrectly or even transcribed incorrectly. 
It is not simply handwriting that is a good reason for cross referencing. One one occasion, we had a census record where a child's birth was recorded. Before the census, the child's father had died. We had not found a record of his death but his widow had remarried and had noted that she was a widow on her new marriage certificate. Later, we had tracked down her late husband's death (he had died abroad) and through cross checking, we realised that he could not be the father of the last child as he was dead before this child could be conceived. We had not looked further into this child's birth at this stage as it was the sibling of the ancestors that we were researching. It turned out to be an interesting story, if sad. The child had been born in the poorhouse but through these records, we were able to piece what had happened to the family after the father's death. Only by cross referencing all the information on this family were we able to piece this story together fully.
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