Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Amy Johnson Crow’s WANDER method for genealogy

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If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m a fan of Amy Johnson Crow. She was one of my first How They Do It interviewees. She’s interviewed me for her podcast a couple of times. She’s one of my favorite genealogy speakers. And we like hanging out at conferences.

When I read her first blog post/podcast episode about her WANDER method, her description of the genealogy research process, I was really impressed. First of all, coming up with a viable acronym isn’t easy. And it so succinctly describes a really smart way to think about the research process.

WANDER means:

Amy creates a blog post from each episode of her podcast, so you have two ways to consume her information. You can read about it or listen to it. (These links give you access to both media.) She first described the WANDER method in this post, called The Genealogy Research Process: The WANDER Method, which provides a general overview. And then she goes in-depth into each step in subsequent posts/episodes. I’ve linked to those episodes above, in the bullet points. As of this writing, Evaluate Everything is her most recent post. I couldn’t wait for the final one before writing about it here!

I encourage you to read and/or listen to these posts/episodes for inspiration for doing some solid research. (She offers a printable method to remember the steps on the overview post!)

August 30 x 30 challenge: Who’s with me?

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I’m in dire need of a new 30 x 30 challenge. I was able to prioritize genealogy research during the June 30 x 30 challenge, but in July, without the accountability of the challenge, I think I did genealogy fewer than half the days.

The COVID crisis is escalating here in Missouri and I’m staying in more than ever. So it seems to me that August is the perfect time for a new 30 x 30 challenge. In August, I hope to get rid of my backlog of unprocessed downloaded documents or at least make a huge dent in it. I’m going to try to be really focused on that. And I vow that if I do download new documents, I will process them the same session I download them.

Are you interested in joining me in committing to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or organizing or whatever else you want to do) for 30 days? If so, please post a comment!

Quick Tip #3: Use standard date format

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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

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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.