Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

You CAN organize your family history

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I just re-read an empowering post that I originally ran here on February 19, 2021. I’ve slightly edited it and am running it again, because I think it’s a powerful message. I hope you think so too.

I’m a big fan of the Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel. I’ve been doing at-home yoga via free videos hosted by Adriene Mishler for just over two years. My practice is a little more spotty these days, but during the pandemic I didn’t miss a day for more than a year.

Why am I mentioning this on my genealogy blog? The video I did on February 19, 2021 was called Yoga for Self Doubt. It was a lovely practice with an encouraging and empowering message. I love Adriene so much, I often ask myself how I can be more like her. I walked off the yoga mat with the intention of being more empowering for my clients and the people who read my blogs. So I decided to simply express encouragement and empowerment on the blog in this post.

If you came to this website because you were confused or overwhelmed about how to organize your genealogy research, I’m here to tell you that as challenging as it might feel, you can do it. It it feels confusing, just get started and the confusion may clear up for you.

Try to let go of any fear that you’ll do it wrong. First of all, there isn’t a right way to organize your genealogy; there’s just the way that works for you. Secondly if you start on a path that doesn’t work for you, you can always tweak it.

Sometimes it can be helpful to do a do-over. Purchase some software, and start entering in your family tree, including only verified facts and citing your sources to back up those facts. That’s what I did when I abandoned my over 100 pages of hand-written (unsourced) five-generation pedigree charts about ten years ago. I take great comfort in knowing I have a solid tree (and I’m improving my source citations and gleaning more information as I work on my source documentation project).

If genealogy ever gets you down, please don’t beat yourself up. Remember you’re fully capable of getting back on course. Take a class. Sign up for the Rootstech virtual (or in-person) conference so you can have access to hundreds of free educational sessions. Keep reading genealogy blogs. Join my mailing list. Use social media to get advice or find cousins who can help.

If you have specific organizing questions related to genealogy, feel free to reach out to me via email and I’ll see if I can help. And if you have suggestions for topics I could cover on the blog, let me know.

Genealogy is an amazing hobby, but I know from experience it’s easy to feel bogged down or overwhelmed. Please don’t feel discouraged. You got this!

Quick Tip #43: Verify family stories

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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 will help you create reliable research.

Verify family stories

We all have family stories that have always been taken as the truth. But when you put on our genealogist, you really need to verify those stories. As when playing the Telephone Game, stories have a way of changing upon repetition. If you want a family tree you can trust and share, use those stories as a basis for research questions and treat them as clues, not fact. I think there’s no bigger thrill than to get to the bottom of a family story and establish it (or a version of it) as fact! Then be sure to cite your sources, so others know that the facts are verified.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

A big milestone: A million page views!

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I find it hard to believe, but this humble blog has reached what feels to me like a great big milestone. Over the weekend, the number of all-time page views surpassed 1,000,000. Over a million hits since the blog began on June 14, 2022. Amazing. (I took the screenshot at left at 5:54 pm on September 30, 2023.)

I am so grateful to OYFH readers who are so so supportive and so engaged. I’m thrilled that the stats reveal there have been almost 6500 comments in that time!

After 813 posts, it’s safe to say it’s getting a little harder to come up with fresh ideas. So please feel free to let me know in the comments if you have any topics you’d like me to cover on the blog.

Thank you so much for helping me get here!

September 30 x 30 challenge wrap up

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It’s October 1, fall is in the air (though it was 86 degrees here in St. Louis today) and the September 30 x 30 challenge has ended. For those of you who participated, how did it go this time?

I had a busy month with other professional commitments and I did not meet my goal of interacting with my genealogy research every day, but I did do some! I hope it was a great month for you. Did you manage to do 30 minutes of genealogy rsearch each day? (Or achieve whatever goal you’d set for yourself?) Please let us know about your progress in the comments!