Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

NARA 2018 Virtual Genealogy Fair is tomorrow!

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I almost missed telling you about the 2018 Virtual Genealogy Fair offered (free of charge) by the National Archives. It’s tomorrow, October 24. This is the sixth year for the conference, offered by webcast. It’s a wonderful resource.

You can read the lineup, with detailed descriptions of the sessions and links to handouts, here. Detailed descriptions of the sessions are posted here, which is also where handouts will be posted when they’re available. (Classes are marked either Beginner” or “Experienced.”) There will be six one-hour sessions, bookended by opening and closing remarks. The even starts at 10 am eastern and ends at 4.

I’m busy with a client tomorrow, so I was thrilled to read that I don’t have to watch live. The webcast will be available on YouTube to watch later. You don’t have to register.

Special thanks to my cousin, Jerry Brown, who alerted me to this year’s conference. It had flown beneath my radar this year.

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!