Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Let’s create history for our descendants this Thanksgiving

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Once again, here’s my annual Thanksgiving post, originally written three years ago. I wish all my readers a wonderful Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.)

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Take action now to fight rate hike for genealogical immigration records

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I follow genealogist Jennifer Mendelsohn on Twitter and through her learned that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS, which used to be called the Immigration and Naturalization Service) is proposing a substantial rate hike for genealogical records.

You can read all the details at Records Not Revenue, but the Reader’s Digest version is that, under the proposal, digitized genealogy records will cost $240 and paper copies will cost $625. The current rate for those same documents is $65. Prior to 2016, the rate was $20 to $35. Obviously, this rate hike would have a big effect on many genealogists’ ability to access these records, which include naturalization files, alien forms, visa files and registry files.

Records Not Revenue, an effort of “coordinated by an ad hoc group of genealogists, historians and records access advocates,” points out that this rate hike is relevant to all genealogists, not just those with immigrant ancestors whose records might be available through the USCIS. The website states, “If USCIS finalizes a rule to make these records much more difficult to access via significant fee hikes, who’s to say other governmental agencies won’t follow suit? Attempts to make one record set less accessible should make any researcher in any field nervous.”

I’m bringing it up now not to worry people but rather because there’s something those of us who are worried can do. Records Not Revenue urges us to read the proposed rule, and submit comments to the Federal Rulemaking Portal, copying our Senators and Representatives, before 16 December 2019. The provide all the links necessary, along with suggested conversation starters. They’ve made it as easy as possible.

To learn more, check out Records Not Revenue, as well as this article on Medium by Jennifer Mendolsohn. That article gives real-life examples of how these records can help people with their genealogy.

Ancestry DNA has updated its ethnicity estimates again

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I was just notified that my ethnicity estimate from Ancestry has been updated once again. According to this post from Ancestry, the estimates are getting more and more accurate because they’re based on more and more data. I don’t don’t really understand how that works but I know there’s lots of information out there when I’m ready to explore.

But I found comparing my estimates with my brother’s as well as with our previous estimates pretty interesting.

Here’s a screenshot of the current new estimates with Larry and me side by side.

So Larry has a good chunk of his DNA indicating Germanic Europe, where I have just a smidge. France and Norway don’t show up in him at all. And I have what appears to be substantially more Irish blood.

Now when I look at a similar image from a year ago (which appeared in this post on our ethnicity estimates) I see how things shifted.

Larry’s portion from Ireland and Scotland went down significantly and Germanic Europe went up. His England, Wales and Northwestern Europe went down slightly and mine went up.  My percent Irish went down, Germanic Europe made its first appearance and Sweden, as well as Greece & the Balkans went away.

I don’t have time to do research to try to understand or analyze this, but I thought you might it prompt you to check to see if your AncestryDNA ethnicity estimate has been updated as well.

P.S. If you haven’t done AncestryDNA but are intrigued, for the next 12 days the kits are on sale for $59, down 40% from the regular price of $99.

Please help with my RootsTech talk

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How does perfectionism get in your way?Back in late September, I created a post asking for your input on the impact of perfectionism in genealogy as I worked on my RootsTech talk, “The Imperfect Genealogist.” I was surprised when I didn’t get much of a response and I then I discovered that an updated security package with my GoDaddy account had turned off commenting as a default and I didn’t realize it.

I’m getting back to work on my talk (it’s due next month!) and thought I’d try again. Thanks very much to those of you who replied to the September post after I got comments up and running! I’d love to hear more from others in comments to this post. Here’s what I wrote in September.

I think about perfectionism a lot. It’s the topic of the podcast I co-host with my friend and life coach Shannon Wilkinson every week. But lately I’ve been thinking about it particularly in relation to genealogy, since I’m working on my RootsTech talk next year, called “The Imperfect Genealogist.”

Here are some ways I have seen perfectionism causing genealogists to stall in their research:

  • You don’t know how to do source citations correctly, so you don’t do them at all.
  • You haven’t come up with the perfect way to organize your research, so you just keep doing research without organizing it.
  • You don’t have a whole weekend to devote to your genealogy research, so you don’t do any research at all.
  • You don’t know the very best way to preserve your archival documents, so you let them languish in an unsafe, non-archival environment. (We discussed this very thing on Episode 20 of Getting to Good Enough.)

It’s your turn. Can you help me out and let me know  how perfectionism can get in the way of your genealogy life? Please share the things you tend to get perfectionistic about and the impact it can have. (If you’ve figured out strategies for getting past that, I’m all ears!) Just leave a comment on this post. I’m sure you’ll contribute things I haven’t even thought of!