Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Research your ancestors on their special days

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April 19 has always been a special day for me. It’s the birthday of my grandmother (Beatrix Flournoy Rasco Adams, 19 Apr 1907 to 23 May 1987) and it’s also my brother’s birthday. He turned 60 yesterday!

Taking note of April 19 reminded me of the great method of deciding what to research shared by Laura Aanenson on the Genealogy Research Loggers Facebook group last year. I blogged about it on January 20, 2017, in a post called Using a calendar to introduce variety into your research. (Laura’s blog is where2look4ancestors.)

In a nutshell, in 2017 Laura was using the calendar function in Family Tree Maker to help her decide to research every day. Each day, the names of those ancestors who were born or married or who died on that day came up on the calendar.  She would choose her research subject from that list.

I use Reunion, which also has a calendar function, but a commenter, Kim, shared the idea of using the Reminders feature in Reunion for the same purpose. I hadn’t even noticed the the Reminders feature. Since I’m pretty focused on my Adams line, I haven’t adopted this procedure. But I love the idea.

If you find this idea intriguing, I encourage you to read that post and to take in the comments as well. Thank you, Laura. This is such a great idea!

How’s your 30 x 30 challenge going?

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We’re halfway through April and a good number of you said you were going to participate in the April 30 x 30 challenge in which we vow to do something genealogy-related for 30 minutes each day throughout the 30 days of the month.

How’s it going? Have you been able to make that daily effort? Is it paying dividends?

I haven’t missed a day yet, I’m happy to say, but I haven’t been able to do much more than 30 minutes either. Because I have a backlog of documents to process, it feels like a little bit of drudgery, I’m afraid. But I know I’ll get through it, even if all I can do is work on it 30 minutes at a time.

I’m going to spend some time thinking about how to deal with the backlog without it feeling like drudgery and I plan to blog about that soon.

If you’re participating in the 30 x 30 challenge (or would like to), please comment and let us know how it’s going!

How many trees?

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How many family trees should you have?I’m occasionally asked how genealogy researchers should split up their family trees. Should they have a separate tree for each parent’s line? Each grandparent’s line? Just one tree?

It’s a question that I didn’t even consider when I set up my family tree in Reunion (the genealogy software I use on my Mac) and in Ancestry. To me, it made sense to start with myself and just work my way up one tree.

(If I were doing my husband’s tree, which may happen some day, I would have a separate tree for him, since our ancestors come from completely different places and have no relevance to one another.)

One thing I like about having all my ancestors together in one tree is that I can easily access a different ancestor if I’m chasing a clue. I use the quickbar button at the top of the Family View for instant access to my most researched ancestors. Or if a name seems familiar, but I’m not sure it’s my person, a quick search will reveal where that person resides in my tree. It’s easy and it works for me.

All that said, I have only 570 people in my tree. (Only verified people with cited source documents I’ve seen are added to my tree, which is my excuse for that number being so small.) If I had a much larger tree, perhaps I’d be singing a different tune.

So I’m curious: How many trees do you have? How have you divided them up? Do you have any regrets?

Unmodified photo by Nichole Renee via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Let’s start an April 30 x 30 challenge

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Time to start a new 30 x 30 challenge! Would you like to join me in committing to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or organizing genealogy research, or doing anything genealogy related) every day for 30 days? We’ll start on April 1 and end on April 30.

I’d been doing really well with daily research for seven months, into late March. But then my father had a health crisis, which caused me to drop everything and travel to Washington state. He’s fine now, but I stuck around to take him to follow up appointments and make sure he’s okay. I’ve been here almost a week and haven’t had an opportunity to do any research at all. So a 30 x 30 challenge will help me get back into the groove. I return home on April 2 and I’ll do my best to get some research time in on April 1. (I’m hampered here by the fact he doesn’t have wifi in his condo.)

Who’s in? If you’d like to join the challenge, make a comment below. Feel free to share what your commitment is; customize the challenge so it works for you. For me, I’ll either research or organize my research in those 30 minutes daily.