Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

April 30 x 30 challenge: check in!

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We’re a little over halfway through the month and therefore more than halfway through the April 30 x 30 challenge. If you’re one of the folks who is participating, how have you been doing with the challenge of 30 minutes of genealogy research for 30 days in a row (or whatever version you’ve created)?

I have to admit, this has been a tough one for me. I knew going in that it was going to be a challenge to do daily research. In the first two weeks of the month, I was out of town nine days. And when I was home, I was busy with organizing clients. So, as I said in the post introducing the challenge, I adjusted my goal to be daily research, no matter how small, with an average of 30 minutes a day stretched out over the month.

I’m happy to say I’ve managed to research each and every day, but I’ve been flexible on what I have to do to meet that standard. Some days I’ve research more than a half hour. Others, only ten minutes. Yesterday, all I did was read an article in the new NGS Quarterly. But the fact is that each day I’ve had something to enter in my research log and that’s made me feel good.

Last weekend, I was able to get a few hours of research in on a rainy day, so I think I’ll achieve my goal of 900 minutes over the course of the month (though I haven’t been keeping close track).

How about you? Have you missed a day? And if you did, did you get right back into it? Please share your progress!

Succeeding at the 30 x 30 challenge

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We’re at the start of a new 30 x 30 challenge (30 minutes of genealogy research for a 30 days in a row). For me, throwing down the gauntlet of the challenge is enough to get me sticking to it–it’s my challenge after all. But I wanted to share some strategies to help you feel successful about the 30 x 30 challenge when the month is over.

This is something that my co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and I discuss on our weekly podcast Getting to Good Enough, which is about letting go of perfectionism so you can do more of what you love. Perfectionism can truly get in the way of sticking with a challenge like this. But it doesn’t have to.

I think the key is building in flexibility to allow yourself to stick with the challenge, even if you miss a day or don’t put in the full 30 minutes. As I said in the post that started this month’s challenge, I’m traveling for a week this month and I know it will be hard to carve out 30 minutes of research some days. So I’ve adapted the challenge a bit. I will feel successful if I research each day (even if it’s just for a few minutes, as it was for me in the airport yesterday), with an average of 30 minutes a day accomplished. And I’m not going to be too upset if I miss a day.

Reader Kim adapted the challenge to be 900 minutes total for the month, regardless of how many days she is able to research. Beautiful! To keep track of those minutes, she found an Evernote habit tracker template and was kind enough to follow up with a comment on last week’s post and tell us how to access it. (Start a new note, click Template in the first line of the new note, select Personal Well-Being from the sidebar, then scroll down to Habit Tracker.) This is a tool that many of us can use to keep track of the challenge. I know it will help me ensure that I average 30 minutes a day. Thank you, Kim, for taking the time to share that information!

Sometimes planning for going off track can help you find success. Things come up that might prevent you from researching some days. Accept that as inevitability and think about how you’ll handle it if it happens. There’s no need to beat yourself up. Just keep going if that happens.

I don’t want you to drop the challenge entirely if you miss a day.  You can still get so much done if you research the other days. (And if you take a moment to plan the next day’s research at the end of a session, you can jump right in at the beginning of the next session, which makes everything easier.)

This week’s episode of Getting to Good Enough is called Getting Back on Track and it’s all about gently re-starting habits that inevitably fall by the wayside. If you have a half hour, give it a listen and you’ll hear some strategies for hopping back on the wagon if you fall off.

To your success!

April 30 x 30 challenge starts Monday!

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As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I’m itching for a new 30 x 30 challenge. I find them so motivating. When I have one going,  genealogy research shoots to the top of my priority list. (Among Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies, I’m an Upholder.)

These past couple of months I’ve let other tasks take priority over genealogy research and I miss my ancestors! So for the month of April, I commit to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research for 30 days. Who’s with me?

For those of you interested in participating, please know that the rules are your own. For example, I will consider myself successful if I research every day and the 30 day average is at least 30 minutes. There may be some days where 30 minutes will be more than I can do (especially since I’m going to an organizers’ conference the first week in April), but I’ll counterbalance that with longer sessions. I just want to do some research every day.

It’s up to you to decide what you want to work on. For me, it’s genealogy research. For you, it might be organizing your genealogy research. Really, anything counts as long as it fits into your own criteria.

If you’d like to join me starting on April 1, please leave a comment. Happy researching!

Getting started again after a hiatus

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One of the things I love about doing daily genealogy research is that I never lose the thread of my research. I jot down next steps in my research log and then each morning I know just what to work on. No agonizing over what to research.

That’s how it’s supposed to work and how it does work when I’m in my groove. But, as I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I’ve done virtually no research for about a month. None. It makes me sad and it’s why I’m starting a 30 x 30 challenge on April 1.

Today I had a sliver of time and some motivation to get back in the saddle. But I faced a conundrum about what to work on. Most recently, I’d been working on eradicating the paper backlog I uncovered. But I’m away from home at the moment so I physically couldn’t do that.

It’s amazing to my how paralyzing the question, “What should I work on?” is. It can stop me in my tracks.

So I started thinking about the various strategies I could employ in figuring out what to work on today:

  • I could look at my research log to see where I left off.
  • I could work on processing my backlog of downloaded documents. (A small one has built up in recent months.)
  • I could open up my Source Documentation Checklist and pick up where I left off.
  • I could look at my follow-up notes, which I keep in notebooks by surname in Evernote.
  • I could choose an ancestor (any ancestor) and see what research questions I have about him/her and get started there.
  • I could look in my family-tree software (I use Reunion) and see if any of my families had a significant event today and work on them. (I wrote about that method here.)
  • If I were at home, I could play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and close my eyes and grab a pin on my ancestor map, then do some research on that ancestor. (That’s my ancestor map in the photo.)

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t really matter what I start working on as long as I re-engage with my research. The important thing is that I get the ball rolling and work on something. (Anything, really.) As my co-host Shannon Wilkinson and I discuss on our podcast Getting to Good Enough, perfectionism can really get in the way of doing what you love!

What I ended up doing was working on my backlog of downloaded documents, which allowed me to jump right in and make progress. It felt great!