Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

January 2024 30 x 30 challenge wrap up

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It’s January 31 already! How was your month? Some aspects of my January were great. I participated in Yoga with Adriene’s 30-day yoga journey and did each at-home yoga practice daily without fail. And I met my goal of closing my fitness rings on my Apple Watch every day. My month was focused on health and fitness, not genealogy. So I can report a successful month.

What about your genealogy research? Did your 30 x 30 genealogy challenge go well? Were you able to meet your goals? Did you make any fun discoveries? Please share all in the comments to this post. That wraps it up for this challenge. I plan to do a new 30 x 30 challenge every two or three months, but of course you can always do one on your own!

I look forward to hearing how everything went!

January 2024 mid-month check in!

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I can’t believe it’s already January 15. It’s time to check in and let us know how your 30 x 30 challenge is going this month. Have you been able to reach your goal of daily research? If not, have you done more research than you might have done without the challenge? Please chime in in the comments and let us know how it’s going, whether you’ve made any great discoveries and/or how you’re feeling about your progress.

I’m not actually participating in this month’s challenge–I’m taking a little break from genealogy research and focusing on my health and fitness. (Nothing bad is happening, I just want to take it up a notch!) And I’ve done great with that this month. In fact, if you’re curious, you can take a look at the current issue of organizing newsletter, which I just published, which has a picture of this month’s habit tracker and all its glorious checks. And please feel free to subscribe to that newsletter, which is for people who love reading about organizing.

I can’t wait to hear how your 30 x 30 challenge is going!

Quick Tip #44: When in doubt, leave it out

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Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every now and then on a small topic that pops into my head. This one is a good adage to apply to your genealogy research.

When in doubt, leave it out

If you want to build a reliable tree, you need to be very careful about what you add to it. If you’re not sure that an ancestor you’ve come across in your research is your ancestor, don’t add that person to your tree until you’ve done more research to verify that this is your person. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the clue; you can park it somewhere. I use follow-up folders organized by surname in Apple Notes to store that information. (I am in the process of switching over to Apple Notes from Evernote for my research log and follow up folders.)

This applies to sources, as well as people.  I don’t add any fact to my tree that I can’t back up with a source. And I want to make sure it’s a reliable source before I add it to the tree.

As someone who created a very unreliable tree in the beginning, I think it’s worthwhile to take a slow and meticulous approach to make sure that my tree is rock solid.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

New year, new 30 x 30 challenge

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Happy New Year! As I mentioned last week, daily research is so helpful. And a great way to help establish the habit of daily research is participating in a 30 x 30 challenge. For the month of January, you’ll strive to do 30 minutes of research every day for 30 days. This is your challenge and you can adapt it however you want. Maybe you want to focus on organizing your research, not doing new research. Or perhaps you want to focus on processing your backlog of downloaded documents. You may want to average 30 minutes a day for the month, not do 30 minutes a day. Whatever works for you is great. You alone measure your success.

I just want to help you focus on what’s important for your research this month. I’ve been holding these challenges periodically since 2015 and have proven to be a great jump start for lots of people.

If you’d like to participate, just say so in the comments. (I know a number of you said you’d participate in the comments for last week’s post, which is great.)

Then, in the middle of the month, I’ll create a post and ask you to report in on your progress this month. And there will be a wrap-up post at the end of the month.

Are you in? I hope it’s a great month for your research. Ready, set, go!