Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick Tip #11: Process each document as you download it

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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. When I don’t do what I suggest in this tip, I always regret it!

Process each document as you download it

I am always battling a backlog of documents I’ve downloaded that need to be processed. By “processed” I mean creating a source citation, going through the document and gleaning facts and adding them to my Reunion database, with each fact sharing a source citation. (I describe how I process a document in this post.)

I love processing documents, actually. But when I’m in a flurry of searching, I sometimes keep downloading without processing. (Though I always rename the document, as described in Quick Tip #1.) When I let that backlog build up, I end up trying to stop myself from doing additional research until I get rid of it. I often accomplish that during a 30 x 30 challenge.

But when I’m on my game, I process as I go and it feels great. (It makes me feel like a researcher, not just a searcher.) I encourage you to give it a try if you’re not already doing it!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Surprise December 30 x 30 challenge!

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My plan was to wait until January for my next 30 x 30 challenge, since that seems like a logical time for one. But I desperately need one now, so I’m going for it. Who would like to join me in committing to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or genealogy organizing or whatever your goals are) every day for 30 days in a row?

I loved doing my 30 minutes a day of research in October, yet I could not sustain it in November in the absence of a challenge. The public accountability of the 30 x 30 challenge really helps me elevate genealogy to the top of my priority list. I know that December is a busy time for many people but December 2020 is special, isn’t it? Maybe this will give you the motivation you need to fit in some genealogy as well.

Just let me know in the comments if you want to participate. We’ll do a mid-month check in and an end-of-the month wrap up. I feel like it’s going to be a great way to set ourselves up for a productive 2021!

New + improved search capability

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I don’t know if you noticed, but a few months ago the Search field disappeared from this blog. I think it was the result of a WordPress update (or perhaps a theme update), but it up and vanished.

I set up and maintain Organize Your Family History on my own but I’m far from a WordPress expert and my efforts to figure out what had happened flailed. Figuring it out was on my task list forever and, finally, I decided to purchase Jetpack Search so that readers would once again be able to search for topics of interest on this site.

In implementing Jetpack Search, I learned that I could no longer use the old location for the Search. (It used to be up at the top, to the right of the menu items.) I’ve now located it in the right sidebar, between my photo and the tag cloud.

I’m excited that the new Jetpack Search is more robust than the old default search used to be. When you search on a term, an overlay window comes up that shows your results, including results that appeared in comments (shown just below the post to which the comment was made). When you’re finished, you just click the X at the top right of the screen to go back to the blog page. Another thing I’m happy about is that, as with Google, if you mistype a word it will try to figure out what you meant. For example, I accidentally typed “Barru” and the search results for “Barry” (my husband’s name) appeared.

If you were inconvenienced by the absence of a Search field for a number of months, I apologize and I thank you for not complaining. I hope you find the new, more robust, search capability helpful!

Check out Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box

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Back in April, I wrote an enthusiastic blog post about my favorite RootsTech 2020 presentation, Do Something with That Box from Stacy Julian. She kindly gave me permission to reprint her helpful handout because she hadn’t written about it on her own website.

I was delighted to see that last month she published a robust blog post on the topic that fleshes out what I wrote about. It’s called How to BEGIN with the Box and I urge you to check it out, even if you’ve read my post. It provides great detail and it includes the downloadable pdf of the handout, along with photos and explanations.

When I drove to Walla Walla in September, I took the opportunity to bring home a box of family stuff. It’s not so much documents as photos, but I intend to use Stacy’s framework as I go through it. (The box been sitting unopened for almost six weeks now…I think our stay-at-home holiday time will be a good time to address it.)

If you have a box of family memorabilia to go through, do yourself a favor and check out her terrific post. You can thank me (well, really, Stacy) later.