Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Free webinar on 1950 census prep

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It’s less than two months until the April 1 release of the 1950 census! I have not done as much preparing as I had hoped, so I was really excited to read that the Legacy FamilyTree webinar CensusGenie: Down to the Wire 1950 Census Prep is available for viewing free of charge through February 9. It’s presented by Cousin Russ and Myrt (Russ Worthington and Pat Richley-Erickson) of Dear Myrtle fame.

To access the webinar, just click on the link above. If you need a coupon code, use 1950census (valid through February 8).

The webinar helps us discover strategies for finding our ancestors on the 1950 census. I sure hope I can make the time to watch in the next few days!

January 30 x 30 wrap up

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Another 30 x 30 challenge is behind us. Did it help you get more genealogy research or genealogy organizing done? Please share in the comments!

I had a good month. I missed two days but did research the other 28 days. On four of those days, my research consisted of attending Amy Johnson Crow’s All About Ancestry webinars, which were 90 minutes to two hours long, so that helped with my daily average. Over the course of the month, I averaged 44 minutes a day for a total of 22 hours of research. That feels great!

One of my goals was to eliminate my backlog of downloaded documents I needed to process. On January 1, I had 77 documents in the backlog. During the month, I downloaded 23 new documents and processed a total of 90 documents, leaving me with a backlog of 10 documents still to process. Hooray! I had a lot of fun and learned a lot about my ancestors.

If you participated in the challenge, please leave a comment. Did the challenge help you get more done than you otherwise would have? Are you pleased with your progress?

I’ll probably do another challenge in March, so keep an eye out!

Quick Tip #32: Found a bad scan? Look again

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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 couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. I’ve benefited more than once from this one!

Found a bad scan? Look again.

If you’re like me, you’ve encountered some documents that were scanned poorly. It can be so disappointing to locate a document, then realize you can’t read everything on it. Here’s what I suggest when that happens.

If the poorly scanned document you found is on Ancestry, see if you can find it on FamilySearch (and vice versa). Documents found on both sites were probably scanned (and indexed) by different people and there may be a better scan on the other site. If you can’t find it on a search, try browsing.

Early on in my researching I found a terrible scan on Ancestry for the 1910 census my grandmother was on. I didn’t think to look for it on FamilySearch and when finally did, nine years later, I found a beautiful scan.

Looking elsewhere for a better scan can be worth a few extra minutes of effort!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Legacy Family Tree offering free one-day genealogy conference on Saturday

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I was pleased to see that Legacy Family Tree, which offers such a wide range of affordable genealogy webinars, is offering a free series of webinars this Saturday and they’re all about genealogy organizing!

You can read all about it here: Treat Yourself to a Genealogy Conference this Saturday.

This is the first in a series of monthly genealogy conferences that Legacy Family Tree intends to offer this year. Presenters at this Saturday’s conference (30 Jan 2022) are:

  • Teri E. Flack
  • Mary Hill
  • Cyndi Ingle (of Cyndi’s List fame)
  • Lisa Louise Cooke
  • Thomas MacEntee

Click on the link above to see the topics of the presentations. According to the notice linked above, “Each conference will include 5 pre-recorded classes (1 class is brand new, 4 classes are hand-selected and unlocked from the members-only webinar library).”

No registration is necessary. Just visit www.FamilyTreeWebinars.com/Conference that day. The conference includes a free syllabus!

Join the mailing list!

When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.