Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

What genealogy podcasts do you listen to?

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Podcasts are all the rage right now. I listen to them daily and enjoy a mixture of self-help, true crime and entertainment. I binge listen to some and listen to others as soon as they are published.

For some reason, I haven’t added a lot of genealogy podcasts to the line up. There are only two genealogy podcasts I listen to regularly. They are:

I’ve been fortunate enough to be a guest on both these shows.

I know I’m missing out on some great genealogy podcasts, so I turn to you. What genealogy podcasts do you listen to? I’d love to add your favorites to my play list.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Can’t come to RootsTech? Watch from home via a virtual pass

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Attending RootsTech isn’t possible for everyone, of course. (Though it’s so large sometimes it feels like everyone and his brother is there.) If you can’t attend in person you can purchase a virtual pass that allows you to watch a pre-selected group of 30 classes from the comfort of your home. The cost is $129 for the virtual pass alone or $79 if purchased as an add-on to an in-person registration. You have a year to view the recordings.

To see the line up of classes being offered in the virtual pass (it looks to me like a great lineup), check out the Virtual Pass page on the RootsTech website. You can also purchase your virtual pass on that page.

In the past some classes have been live streamed and that might well be the case this year. You can view past live streamed sessions now on the RootsTech Video Archive page.

I’m excited for RootsTech this year and am looking forward to presenting “The Imperfect Genealogist” there. If you haven’t already, please let me know in the comments if you’ll be attending. And if you’re going and haven’t downloaded the app yet, it is available!

Time for January 30 x 30 check in!

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It’s almost the middle of our January 30 x 30 challenge. For those of you who signed up, how is it going? Are you managing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or organizing or scanning or whatever it is you set out to do)?

My challenge was made a little extra challenging by travel. I was in Walla Walla, Washington, visiting my dad from January 3 to 12.  I’m happy to say that I did manage to research every day, but one of those days barely counts. The day I traveled home (a 12-hour journey by car and plane) I thought I’d get research done on the plane, but when I started working I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. So the ten minutes I put in was barely productive. I give myself credit for at least trying, but execution was not impressive.

One thing that’s helped me get back on track is that yesterday, back at my desk, I decided to pull out my 2nd great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, which I’d received way back in 2015. At the NGS conference that year, I heard Julie Miller talk about these files: what they contain and how to process them. I immediately requested the complete pension files for my three Union veteran ancestors from the National Archives. I’ve already processed the other two but had not focused on the file of Benjamin Franklin Igleheart. Since I’ve turned my attention to the Igleheart line, this is a natural thing for me to work on.

Once I pulled it out of the file (I haven’t yet scanned it), I saw that I’d started by putting the pages in chronological order and created a source citation for the whole pension file. The next step is to create a source citation for each individual document, print the citation on a label and affix the label to the paper document before scanning the whole document. After it’s scanned, I’ll start transcribing it. Yesterday I spent 45 minutes creating the citations and their labels and got through about eleven documents before having to move on to something else. For the near future, this will be the project I’ll be working every day.

I’d forgotten how great it was to have a project like this that I can break down into tiny bites. I love knowing exactly what I’m going to be working on and I love that there are lots of little milestones in this giant project so I can celebrate my progress.

Enough about me. I hope your challenge is going well and I look forward to hearing about it in the comments!

My “good enough” research log

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My good enough research logWe’re in the midst of a 30 x 30 challenge this month so I’ve been researching every day. It feels great. I have no more than 30 minutes (sometimes less) to research most days this month, so I rely on my research log to help me start each session.

I’ve blogged before about my research log and its value. This month, because I’m working on my RootsTech talk “The Imperfection Genealogist,” I’ve been reflecting on the fact that my very informal research log is far from perfect. But it’s certainly good enough.

How do I know it’s good enough? It’s because I’m in touch with why I want to keep a research log and the ways I use it. For me, it’s about knowing what I’ve researched in a given session and (perhaps more importantly) what my next steps are. It also tells me at a glance how frequently I’m researching. I keep my research log in Evernote, but I track of all my documents and family tree elsewhere, so I’m not creating source citations or storing documents in my research log. You might have a research log for different reasons. And yours may be very different from mine. And that’s great.

My good-enough research log is an Evernote notebook by year (I started the 2020 research log notebooks ten days ago), pinned as a shortcut in the sidebar. Each time I research, I open the notebook, create a new note with today’s date, and then write in free from what I worked on that day. I write down the questions that come up. I write down any discoveries. And I end the session by writing down the next steps. That way, when I start the next session, whether it’s the next day or the next month, I know where to start. That’s been a huge time saver for me. (I blogged in more detail about my research log in this post. About a year ago, I wrote a post about how my research log keeps me focused.)

This month, I’ve added an Evernote template that allows me to check off that I completed a session and I also add how many minutes I researched, because I’m hoping that I’ll get in 900 minutes in the 30 x 30 challenge, even if I don’t manage 30 minutes in some individual sessions. This is motivating to me, because when I see the checkmarks each day it makes me want to not break the chain. I also jot down in a couple of words what type of work I did. The picture at the top of this post is screenshot of the note that contains the template, which is in addition to my usual daily note but also stored in the 2020 research log notebook. (To get that template, I clicked on New Note, then on Template right in the note, then Habit Tracker in the Template Gallery. That inserted the template into the note and I edited it a bit.)

When I first started contemplating creating a research log in 2012, I could understand its value but I got wrapped up in trying to do it perfectly. Predictably, my first attempts failed. But as soon as I got in touch with what I really wanted out a research log and I made it easy to accomplish, things fell into place. Now, I’m glad to say that I’ve developed a habit of logging my session every day.

A couple of years ago, I created a Facebook group called Genealogy Research Loggers. We’re a pretty quiet group, but if you’d like some help and accountability for creating a research log habit, please join us!