Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

October 30 x 30 update

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We had a good turnout of folks who said they wanted to participate in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge, in which we committed to doing 30 minutes of some genealogy-related activity for 30 days in a row. How’s it going? Please report in!

For me, this month’s challenge has been harder than usual. I’ve had a busy month with early appointments with organizing clients and I gave a talk at the St. Louis Genealogy Conference, last Saturday, which was a bit time consuming to prepare. So I haven’t researched each and every day–according to my research log, I missed three days completely. I know that on some of the days I did research, I wasn’t able to put in a full 30 minutes. I’m confident it will average to 30 minutes a day (helped by the fact that I attended a six-hour genealogy conference). And I’m okay with that.

Because of the 30 x 30 challenge, I definitely did research that I wouldn’t have otherwise done. This is why I love these challenges!

Even though I fell off the wagon a little bit, I fully intend to keep going and try not to miss any days the rest of the month. That’s progress, because I have a tendency to abandon daily challenges (especially those that involve exercise) if I break the chain.

I’d love to hear how it’s going for you! Have you been able to keep up with daily research? If you missed a day, did you hop right back on the challenge?

Don’t let perfectionism paralyze you

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As I mentioned earlier this summer, I’ve started a podcast with Shannon Wilkinson called Getting to Good Enough. Every week we release a new episode about overcoming perfectionism so you can do more of what you love.

Perfectionism can certainly come into play with genealogy research, which Shannon and I explored that in this week’s episode. Shannon is a newer genealogy researcher (she went with me to RootsTech this year) and she has some perfectionist tendencies. She was very fortunate to uncover a literal treasure trove of family documents when she was cleaning out her mother’s home after her mother moved to a care home. She quickly became overwhelmed by the responsibility of the stewardship of these documents and was striving to handle them perfectly. She was paralyzed and couldn’t get started on working with them.

In Episode 20 of the podcast, which is one of our “Good Enough in Practice” episodes where we explore how we’re embracing good enough in our own lives, Shannon and I discuss how perfectionism can interfere with progress in genealogy research. We brainstormed how she could get started with her documents and she put together a plan. Shortly after our discussion she was able to get started processing them. I encourage you to give it a listen. I think it’s an interesting discussion.

You can listen right on our website or on iTunes or Google Play or Stitcher.

Full transparency: Getting rid of my backlog

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As I mentioned in my Searcher vs researcher post at the end of August, I was overwhelmed by the documents I had downloaded over the past few months and not processed. I knew there was information in those documents that I needed to analyze and add to my Reunion software. Letting them languish without analysis was not smart. And it was stressing me out.

So I vowed not to search for new information until I’d processed all those documents. There were 103 of them, including 30 loose documents; 49 documents in a Montana folder (most of them newspaper articles) about my father’s uncle, Harry Adams (1895-1977), who was a legendary coach at the University of Montana; and 24 19th-century deeds for my Adams ancestors.

I worked diligently on this backlog. Every research session was devoted to it. I loved the focus that this project gave me. I wasn’t able to completely stop searching, but I did process any documents I downloaded in the same session in which I downloaded them, so I didn’t add to my backlog. To keep me going, I kept a spreadsheet of my progress.

I was out of town visiting my father the last week of September and didn’t do any document processing (except on my plane rides) but I started up when I returned. On October 2, I declared the project finished! But here’s a big caveat: I didn’t process the deeds. I couldn’t face them, because they need transcription and I just wasn’t up to tedium of that task. I’ve shifted my research focus from the Adams family to the Rasco family and so I gave myself permission to let those deeds lie dormant in my Adams surname folder until I start researching Adams line again.

So I ended up processing 79 documents in this burst. I feel good about this decision and about this whole project. It’s great to have that backlog virtually eliminated. I’m newly dedicated to not letting it build up again–I’m cognizant of the fact that I need stop searching and start processing well before the end of a research session so that I stay on top of these documents.

For the most part, when I came up with new research possibilities while processing my backlog, I made a note in one of my follow-up notebooks (I have follow-up notebooks, organized by surname in Evernote) and now I’m exploring those possibilities, focusing on the Rascos, which has been fun.

Staying focused in my research is a something I deal with constantly. Finishing this project makes me feel more focused and on top of my research. That’s a great feeling!

Using Family Search to find images referenced on Ancestry (screencast)

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Today I was doing some research on Ancestry. (I’ve finished my backlog project and have lifted my ban on searching–more on that in a future post.) I was looking for a death certificate for my grandmother’s sister whom I had just learned through Find A Grave had died at the age of six, in 1922.

A simple Birth/Marriage/Death records search produced a collection called Washington, Select Death Certificates, 1907-1960, but when I clicked on it, it said “No Image Text-only collection.” (A picture of that screen is at the top of this post.) I saw that there was a FHL film number, so I went to Family Search to try to track down the document.

I was successful in finding an image of the death certificate, though I had to jump through a few hoops. After I successfully downloaded and processed it, I decided to do a screencast of the process, in case it help someone here.

Here’s the screencast:

A quick summary is that I searched on the film number in the catalog at Family Search, then when I got another No Image Available message there, I drilled down further to the actual microfilm number mentioned on Ancestry and did another search. That brought up the image. If it hadn’t, I would have gone to the image number (listed in the initial search result at Family Search) in that digitized microfilm. Bottom line: don’t give up if you’re told an image isn’t available!

You can find more information on using Family Search’s card catalog in this post from a year ago: Using the card catalog to find elusive documents on Family Search. And if you’re interested in how I processed that death certificate after I downloaded it, check out the blog post How I process a downloaded document.