Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

What are your genealogy goals?

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I don’t know if it’s because I’m a professional organizer or if it’s just how I’m wired, but I love setting goals. I set goals for my personal life, my genealogy life, and, of course, my organizing business every year. I typically take a one-day retreat (I detailed how that works in this blog post on my organizing blog last year) devoted to reviewing last year’s goals and setting goals for the coming year.

These are the genealogy goals I set for 2018:

  • Come up with a scheme for keeping me focused
  • Index at least four hours a month at Family Search
  • Attend at least three genealogy conferences
  • Attend at least one week-long institute
  • Go on a research trip
  • Improve my research log and/or my capturing of tasks
  • Add 300 sources to Reunion
  • Create the habit of researching daily

In looking at them today, I’m feeling pretty good, except for the indiexing. Not only did I do no indexing, I didn’t even remember that I wanted to index! Here’s the rest of the scorecard:

  • I feel like I became much more focused in my research–sticking with the Adams line the first six months and shifting to the Rasco line in the latter half of the year helped me stay focused on my research in general. And my short sessions have kept me quite focused.
  • I attended three genealogy conferences: RootsTech in Salt Lake City, the Missouri State Genealogical Association conference in Columbia, Missouri and the St. Louis Genealogy Conference. In addition, I attended a House History workshop from the Missouri Historical Society and a day-long DNA workshop presented by Diahan Southard, sponsored by the St. Louis Genealogical Society.
  • I had to shelve my goal of attending a week-long institute and taking a research trip because my husband was laid off this year and it didn’t seem prudent. He’s happily employed now, so perhaps I can add those things to my 2019 goals.
  • I’m not sure I improved my research log but I did improve my frequency of use. The habit of recording my research activities every session (informally in Evernote) is now ingrained. That’s huge!
  • I was sure I’d added 300 sources to Reunion until I looked. I have just shy of 900 sources and added 185 of them in 2018. I think that goal was just unrealistic.
  • As for daily research, I did better some months than others. These last two months have been much more spotty. But according to my research log, I rocked it in January, February, March, July, August and October. I feel pretty good about that, though there’s room for improvement.

My annual retreat this year will be on December 26. Once again, I’ll include my genealogy research goals in the planning process. Incidentally, a tool that I’ll be using in the process is the Good Enough Goal Setting workbook + audio that my  Getting to Good Enough podcast co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and I created. I encourage you to check it out!

Do you set goals for your genealogy research? Please feel free to share them in the comments, if you’d like!

 

Fun with ethnicity estimates

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I had my DNA tested by Ancestry a few years back and I’m just now figuring out how to use it in my genealogy research. I found the ethnicity estimate interesting. And then I found it even more interesting when Ancestry updated its estimates.

My brother, Larry, lives in Australia and when he visited recently he agreed to submit a sample. I was curious about how ours would compare, in terms of ethnicity. I was also curious to see what migration group was provided to him. (I was given North Alabama Settlers.)

When I first asked him, Larry’s response, “Don’t we have the same DNA?” I responded that while our DNA comes the same sources (half from our dad and half from our mom), what we get from each of them is different so our ethnicity results might be different.

The results arrived yesterday and I was tickled to see that there were what looked to me like some fairly large differences. Here’s a screenshot of our two results side by side:

 

As you can see, I have a higher percentage of Irish ancestry showing up in my results (41% vs 34% in Larry’s) and his results show 8% Germanic Europe, where I have none. I have a smidge of Greece and the Balkans and he has a smidge of Sweden. Fun stuff!

Oh, and the migration group provided to Larry was Lower Midwest and Virginia Settlers.

Have you compared ethnicity results with a sibling? I’m curious how different your results were.

Reconnecting with my ancestors

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I miss my ancestors. November was a crazy month–in the first half I was busy with some big projects for my organizing clients and in the second half I was hosting a visit from my brother, Larry and his daughter, Miranda, who live in Australia. Then the three of us left to go visit my father in Walla Walla, Washington. That’s where I am now.

Looking at my research log, I see that I researched exactly once in November 2018. That is unacceptable and such a far cry from the almost-daily research I’d been enjoying.

Even though my routines are still messed up by traveling, at the beginning of December I pressed reset and started back with daily research. I missed yesterday, but I hope not to miss any more days this month. If I do, I’ll cut myself some slack and get right back on board.

This morning, I re-read a post I’d written in May 2017 where I talked about circumstances leading up to a (much briefer) research hiatus. In that post, I talked about the fall-back projects I have where I can make a little progress in a brief period of time and keep the daily research going, even if it’s very brief.

I’m so glad I read it and was reminded of my source documentation project from 2016, where I started going back through my sources, making sure they were cited consistently and that all the relevant data was extracted from each document. I also make sure that an image of the source document is attached to the source record in Reunion.

I’ve found that over the last half dozen years, I’ve become a more skilled researcher. Back in the day, I missed a lot, so this is a really worthwhile endeavor. When I started checking my source documentation in 2016 I had 300 sources and I’ve checked 85 of them. Two and a half years later, I have 896 sources. I’d like to think that at some point I’ll decide that I can stop checking the sources because I knew what I was doing and there’s nothing to be gained. I can’t wait to find out at what point that happened!

Unless feel like exploring something else, I’ll stick to reviewing my source documents for the rest of the year as I think about my genealogy goals for 2019. I’m excited to get back in the swing of things and reconnect with my ancestors!

Edited to add: During today’s source documentation checking, I discovered that my great grandmother’s sister was married the same day she was. My 2nd great aunt and her husband are on the same scan of the marriage record book as my great grandparents. Shame on me for missing that, but I’m so glad I was able to add a person to my tree simply by checking my sources!

Do you use Ancestry Academy?

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Ancestry has always been my go-to resource for genealogy research. I think I’ve had a subscription for more than a decade and, for me, the annual subscription fee (currently $189) is well worth it.

When I first subscribed, I explored the courses at Ancestry Academy but wasn’t willing to pay extra to take the classes. But earlier this year I learned that the Ancestry Academy courses are now included in the subscription.

It took me awhile but today, I finally checked it out. I was really impressed with the variety of topics addressed in these video lessons, as well as the variety of lengths. You can watch a five-minute video or take a one-hour video lesson (or something in between).

I’m curious whether any of my readers have tried it and what you thought! If you have any particular classes you thought were great, I’d love to hear about them!