Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Free daily webinars on Legacy Family Tree this month

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Ready for some genealogy learning? Legacy Family Tree Webinars has provided another great opportunity to expand our knowledge while our time at home is expanded. Every day in April, they’ll be offering a different free webinar. To access it, go to the Legacy Family Tree Webinars homepage and look for the yellow bar at the top of the screen that says Click here to watch today’s free webinar. (Every day in April – a free webinar!). Just click there and you’ll be able to watch the webinar of the day; no login required.

Each day of the week has as theme this month:

  • Sundays – Methodology
  • Mondays – DNA
  • Tuesdays – Ethnic Genealogy
  • Wednesdays – Technology
  • Thursdays – Around the Globe
  • Fridays – Beginners
  • Saturdays – TechZone

Visit this page on Legacy Family Tree to see a complete list of the free offerings and the day each is offered. Then mark your calendar!

It’s the end of the month! How’d your 30 x 30 challenge go?

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What a month. It feels more like 130 days since I posted about the March 30 x 30 challenge. The fact that many of us are spending so much time home probably made it easier for some of us to do 30 minutes of research for 30 days. But for others (like me) the abnormal situation has proven very distracting. I did manage to kick my genealogy in gear the last week or so of the month, focusing on webinars and on my third Civil War pension file.

I used a few of my research sessions to get the pension file ready for transcribing. It came to me from the National Archives five years ago in paper form, on legal size pages. I’ve done this twice before and outlined how I process a pension file in an earlier blog post. But basically what I did this week was put the 96-page paper file in chronological order, create a master source citation for the whole thing and separate source citations for each of the 53 documents, create and print labels for each source and then affix the labels to the appropriate paper documents before scanning the whole thing. Now I can work 30 minutes a day transcribing and adding information gleaned from the file into my genealogy software. So that feels like progress, even though I didn’t actually work 30 minutes a day.

How about you? If you participated in the challenge, were you able to keep up with your daily research? I welcome anything you’d like to share in the comments about how this most unusual month affected your research.

I hope you and yours are staying healthy.

Help others (and yourself) by indexing

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When the self-isolation around the COVID-19 crisis started, I jotted down some things I might do to occupy my time. I was inspired at RootsTech to volunteer to index once again for Family Search (I hadn’t done it since the 2017 Worldwide Indexing Event) so I added indexing to my list. This past week, I gave it a try.

Family Search makes it so easy to volunteer to index. I logged in, selected Indexing from the top menu bar, then Find a Project. I focused on the United States (there are plenty of opportunities in other countries as well), then selected “US, Michigan–Naturalization Records, 1837-1933.” I did a thorough reading of the instructions and indexed a batch. I only did it for a short while that day, but I plan to go back to it this weekend.

If you’re getting a little tired of your own research, this might be a nice change of pace. As someone who has benefited from the volunteer indexing efforts of others, it feels nice to contribute. And here’s a bonus: Indexing might make you a better researcher!

More time for genealogy?

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If you’re staying home 24/7 right now, all this time at home might be a boon for your genealogy research. But I have to admit it hasn’t really benefited mine, not yet anyway. I’m feeling a little untethered without work appointments providing structure to my day. I’m trying to make the best of the situation by accomplishing some of the tasks and projects for my organizing business that I felt I didn’t have time for in the past. As a result, I’m feeling disconnected from my genealogy research. I hate that feeling.

But what I’m trying to do to regain the spark and connection to my research is spend some of my free time on the many learning opportunities available to me from my computer. There’s a lot from which to choose, some free and some paid. In case it’s helpful to you, I’ll list some of the resources I’m choosing among:

I’m easily overwhelmed by choices, so I’m not even considering the many learning resources I’ve downloaded over the years that are waiting to be read or viewed.

How about you? Are you using your extra home time to do more research or learn more about researching?