Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

A heartfelt goodbye and thank you

By 24 Comments

After more than a decade of writing Organize Your Family History, I’m writing today with mixed emotions to let you know that I’m retiring the blog and my Orderly Roots Guides.

When I started this journey in 2012, I had no idea how many amazing genealogists I’d meet or how much joy I would find in sharing my passion and curiosity about genealogy organizing. (And I never dreamed I’d get over a million page views!) The best part has been the community of readers. Over the years, we’ve celebrated breakthroughs, broken down brick walls, and built a supportive community together. I’ve even had a chance to meet some of you in person at genealogy conferences. And I’m deeply grateful for every comment, story, and connection.

As my own genealogy research has slowed, so has my blog posting. I believe it’s time to step back, leave the archive available for all, and close the chapter on creating new content.

Here’s what I want you to know:

  • The blog will remain online as a free resource—please continue to use and share it!
  • The Orderly Roots Guides will be available for just another week. As a thank you and a final opportunity for anyone who wants ro read them, I’m offering them at a 50 percent discount through January 4.
  • After January 4, the guides will be retired and no longer available for purchase.

As a thank you for all your support, I’m offering a special farewell sale on the Orderly Roots Guides—available now through January 4. This is your last chance to get them before they’re retired. Click here to learn more about the individual guides and the bundle. Use the coupon code GOODBYE to get 50% off the contents of your cart.

Thank you for making this journey so rewarding. Your support, enthusiasm, and stories have meant the world to me. If you’d like to share how the blog or guides have helped you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

November 2025 30 x 30 challenge wrap up

By 4 Comments

November is over and it’s time to fess up. How did your 30 x 30 challenge go? I’d love to know whether you were able to put in 30 minutes a day and what you accomplished. And if you weren’t able to do 30 minutes, did you do more than you might otherwise have done? Any insights from the month?

The focus of my month was blogging. In the mid-month check in, I wrote, “I hope to be able to tell you at the end of the month that I’ve posted at least twice on each of my three blogs. (This post counts!)” I did post three times on Organize Your Family History (if you count today’s post), and I posted twice on Peace of Mind Organizing (if you count today’s post) and I posted twice on Peace of Mind Spending (if you count today’s post). I’m going to cut myself some slack and say I met that stated goal. But I also wrote in that post, “My hope is to spend at least a half hour a day each weekday in the next two weeks on blogging. I’ll most likely take Thanksgiving and the day after off.” I did not devote that kind of time to blogging. So that’s a fail.

I hope at least some of you who had committed to the challenge did better than me! I’d love to hear about it. Please post a comment and let us know how it went for youQ

Talk to your older relatives and create history for your descendants

By Leave a Comment

This Thursday is Thanksgiving for those of us who live in the U.S. I originally wrote this Thanksgiving post in 2016, and I like repeating it every year. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! I am grateful for you!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions about their lives and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.) Or we can do what Stacy Julian does and ask our relatives to fill out a simple form.

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

November 2025 30 x 30 challenge: Mid-month check in

By 6 Comments

We’re halfway through this month’s 30 x 30 challenge and I’d love to know how it’s going. For those of you who are participating: have you been able to put in 30 minutes a day? Or have you averaged 30 minutes a day? Even if you haven’t, have you found the challenge helpful?

I had said that I was going to use my 30 x 30 challenge this month to focus on blogging. And then I completely forgot about that commitment. It doesn’t help that I was on a trip to New York with my college pals most of last week. But the fact is I have not posted on any of my blogs this month! The good news is that I’ve now reminded myself of this commitment and I can start again.

I hope to be able to tell you at the end of the month that I’ve posted at least twice on each of my three blogs. (This post counts!) My hope is to spend at least a half hour a day each weekday in the next two weeks on blogging. I’ll most likely take Thanksgiving and the day after off.

So what about you? There’s no report you can make that would be less embarrassing than the one I just made. Please let me know how it’s going!