Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Explore Folklore of the Family at Mid-Continent Public Library Spring Seminar on March 25

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If you live in the Midwest, like I do, you might be excited to learn about the Spring Seminar (theme: Folklore of the Family) being sponsored by the Mid-Continent Public Library (home of the Midwest Genealogy Center) in Independence, Missouri on March 25, 2023. Early-bird pricing of $35 ends tomorrow, February 15. After that, the price goes to $40. That’s such a bargain–and registration includes lunch! Please note that advanced registration is required and registration closes on March 23.

The featured speaker is Gena Philibert-Ortega and the topics she’ll cover include proving (or disproving) family stories, genealogy and the history of food, genealogy-rich ephemera and researching female ancestors. Gena is a respected speaker and writer and a very nice person. I was thrilled to have Gena participate in my How They Do It series back in December 2021, but I haven’t heard her speak in person. I’d really like to go, if I can swing it.

As a special bonus, there’s a musical performance by mother-daughter folk singers Kristin and Lucy Gray Hamilton!

Go the MCPL website learn more about the program and register. If you decide to go, please let me know in the comments if you’d like to meet up!

 

Four genealogy habits to create now

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I’m a huge fan of creating beneficial habits. When you have a habit going, it becomes automatic–at least for awhile! And when that happens, life gets easier. (You might enjoy listening to Episode 22 of the podcast I co-host, Getting to Good Enough, called Creating Helpful Habits.)

I got to thinking about the genealogy habits that benefit me and four jumped to mind. Your future self will thank you if you do these four things every time you research:

  1. Rename the files you download. Having a consistent file-naming protocol will help make sure you don’t lose valuable documents on your hard drive. (See this blog post if you’re interested in my file-naming protocol and folder structure.)
  2. Process each document right after you download it. By process, I mean extract all the data from it and enter it in your genealogy software. Be sure to create a source citation (see #3 below). If you do this, you won’t have an ever-present backlog of unprocessed documents nagging at you. And you get to further your research!
  3. Create a source citation for every document and assign a source to every fact. In my genealogy life no fact goes into my database (I use Reunion) without a source citation. That’s how I know I can trust my research. (And so can other people.)
  4. Log your research during each session or, at the very least, write out your next steps. It is so useful to be able to pull up your research log and see where you left off. It eliminates that overwhelming question, “What should I research today?” (Here’s a post on my very informal research log.)

The good news is that while these habits are important, they’re not hard. I encourage you to work on creating great genealogy habits. It can take some of the frustration out of the research process. You want your genealogy research to be as frustration-free as possible!

For detailed information on how I organize my own genealogy research, check out my Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow, available for $19.99.

Two-part program on Zotero for genealogy starts tomorrow

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Reader Donna Cox Baker is an enthusiastic advocate for using the tool Zotero to organize genealogy research. She wrote a guest post about it for this blog and also described it in her How I Do It interview from 2018.

So I was interested when I received an email yesterday from about a two-part program that Donna is teaching for the Bucks County (Pennsylvania) Genealogy Society (BCGS) called “Zotero for Genealogy: Harnessing the Power of Your Research.” The first part is tomorrow, February 4, from 10 am to 12 pm eastern. The second part will be on March 4. Donna says, “Part I will be about the essential core of Zotero and why genealogists need it. Part II will be about various creative ways I’ve expanded on the Zotero basics to make it a real powerhouse tool–such things as timelines, map legends, ticklers, research planning, thought mapping, and more.”

I still haven’t explored Zotero, so I’m interested in watching her programs. The fee is $10 per workshop for non-members of BCGS and $5 for members. The presentations are being recorded and will be available, to members only, for 30 days. I’m not able to attend live tomorrow, so I elected to join the Bucks County Genealogical Society for only $20 and then I’ll have $5 access to the two workshops (and any future workshops in 2023.) It’s worth it to me to pay an extra $10 for access to the recordings for 30 days.

If you’re interested too, go to this page on the BCGS website to learn about the program and this page to register as a non-member. If you’d rather join first, you can read about membership benefits or skip right to the online membership application form. It’s worth noting that when I joined this morning, I did not instantly gain access to registering for the program at the members’ rate. (I’m waiting for a welcome email with a login.) So if you’re planning to go this route, you might want to join today rather than waiting for tomorrow.

January 2023 30 x 30 challenge wrap up

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Today’s the last day of January. Does it feel like the month lasted forever? Oh my gosh, January 1 seems like eons ago. In any case, it’s also the end of the 30 x 30 challenge. How did you do? Were you able to do genealogy research or organizing (or whatever your goal was) every day for 30 days?

My month started off GREAT! But then my research screeched to a halt on January 19. I traveled to Walla Walla on the 18th to settle my father’s estate (and I actually processed some documents on the plane) but, unfortunately, I picked up a virus of some sort while traveling. (I tested negative for COVID consistently on home tests and once I got home I went to urgent care and got a negative PCR test for COVID and a negative flu test.) While I was in Walla Walla it took all my energy to do what I was there to do and I was able to do virtually nothing else. So I did no genealogy research at all. By the time I got home to St. Louis last week I was really sick and barely able to function. I started feeling better yesterday and today my energy levels are almost normal.

What I think I want to do for myself and for my research is pick up where I left off and try to do another 11 days in a row to get back in the swing of the things. (I’m going to try to do the same thing with yoga, since my 30-day yoga journey also went off the rails.)

I sincerely hope those of you who did the 30 x 30 with me had a better time of it! I look forward to hearing about it in the comments.