Janine Adams - Author at Organize Your Family History

Quick Tip #3: Use standard date format

July 28, 2020 By Janine Adams 10 Comments

Here’s the next in my 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) high-impact post every couple of weeks. This one has become second nature to me, even when I’m not doing genealogy!

Use standard genealogy formatting when writing dates

If you’ve been doing genealogy awhile, you’re probably already doing this, but for newer genealogists, I suggest using a standard date format for your genealogy dates to avoid confusion. Here’s my understanding of the accepted format:

Day of the month expressed in one or two digits, followed by the three-letter abbreviation for the month and then the year, expressed in four digits. (DD MMM YYYY). Note the absence of a comma or slashes.

So my mother’s birthday, which she probably wrote most often as May 2, 1933, is expressed 2 May 1933 in my genealogy software.

Using a standardized format eliminates some of the guess work for people who look at your data. Most U.S. folks are accustomed to writing dates like this: MM-DD-YY (7-10-20). But people in many other countries tend to put the day of the month first, as in DD-MM-YY (10-07-20). Using letters for the month eliminates confusion. And it’s essential to use all four years of the date because we genealogists are working in multiple centuries.

This is an easy habit to get into with repetition. And it’s well worth it, in my opinion!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Time for me to address my backlog

July 24, 2020 By Janine Adams 4 Comments

I hate it when I let a backlog of downloaded files build up. I know that downloading a file without gleaning the facts from it and adding it to my genealogy software does not further my research. And yet I struggle with backlogs. My most recent post on my struggle was in October 2018. That fall, I vowed to eliminate my backlog and I succeeded in doing it, sort of. I took a group of deeds I couldn’t face and moved them to a foldern unprocessed. But otherwise, I processed 79 downloaded documents by making backlog-busting my research focus.

Well, the backlog has built up again and it’s time to address it. I have 78 documents languishing in my Surnames folder, waiting to be processed and filed in their appropriate folders. I plan to announce an August 30 x 30 challenge next week and my focus in August will be to get rid of that backlog. Two years ago, I created a spreadsheet in which I kept a running tally of the numbers of files I needed to process. I found updating it every session to be quite rewarding. So I think I’ll employ that strategy again.

One reason for my large backlog is that I went on a sprint of newspaper research in June and July. I had a seven-day free trial of newspapers.com and then bought a 30-day subscription that expired July 22. I found myself downloading, but not necessarily processing, a bunch of newspaper articles. (I did process some of them, though!)

In organizing, we refer to this as backsliding. I know how to process documents. I actually enjoy processing documents. But when I let a backlog build up it quickly gets overwhelming and less enjoyable. I find that focusing on the backlog to get it back to zero brings me great peace of mind.

In order to succeed at getting rid of my backlog, I know I have to avoid downloading any new documents while I’m focused on the backlog. Any documents I do download, I must commit to processing in the same research session. That way the number of documents left to process goes down every day. (Come to think about it, that’s not unlike dealing with physical clutter, credit card debt or any number of other scenarios!)

I bet I’m not the only one dealing with a backlog of genealogy documents (either digital or paper) that have been collected but not dealt with. If you have a backlog, feel free to join me in backlog busting in August!

For more in-depth information on how I organize my own genealogy, including dealing with my backlog, check out How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow, a 37-page downloadable pdf published in 2021 and available for $19.99.

Avoiding the paralysis of perfectionism

July 21, 2020 By Janine Adams Leave a Comment

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might know that I co-host a podcast called Getting to Good Enough. Every week, my co-host Shannon Wilkinson and I publish an episode aimed toward helping listeners let go of perfectionism so they can do more of what they love.

This week we’ll publish Episode 113, but way back in Episode 20, which was published on October 11, 2018, we focused on genealogy. (I blogged about it at the time.) So far it’s our only genealogy-focused episode, though the principles we discuss every week can be applied to genealogy.

It occurred to me that some of the readers of this blog might not be aware of the podcast, or that we had a genealogy-focused episode, so I wanted to draw your attention to it. You can listen on our website or on iTunes or Google Play or Stitcher.

Letting go of perfectionism has become one of my passions and it was the subject of the RootsTech talk I gave in February, as well as the Zoom presentation I did for the North Hills Genealogists in May. I am indebted to the readers of this blog who helped me craft that presentation by responding to my request for comments on how perfectionism has been a problem in genealogy.

I urge you to give it a listen. Feel free to let me know in the comments if perfectionism sometimes gets in the way of your genealogy research and whether you’ve come up with any strategies to get past it!

Quick Tip #2: Jot down your next actions

July 15, 2020 By Janine Adams Leave a Comment

Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. You can see my other Quick Tips by clicking on the Quick Tips tag. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) high-impact post every now and then. This one is about a habit that was a game changer for me!

Jot down your next actions at the end of every research session

I used to become overwhelmed at the beginning of every research session because I didn’t know what I should work on. There were so many possibilities! That problem was solved by one simple habit. At the end of every session, I write down my next steps. So all I have to do is look at that note and get to work.

I write it in my super-simple research log, but it doesn’t matter where you write down yours, just as long as you do it. I’d encourage you to be consistent in where you write it (and to avoid putting it on a sticky note or a piece of scrap paper that can get lost or create clutter). Stick with it for a little and it will become a habit.

Creating this habit has taken away a huge impediment to my research and I encourage you to give it a try!