Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

You got this!

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I’m a big fan of the Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel. I’ve been doing at-home yoga via free videos hosted by Adriene Mishler for just over two years. I haven’t missed a day since April 1, 2020. This month I’m following her February calendar (called Bridge), doing the video she’s selected for the day.

Why am I mentioning this on my genealogy blog? Today’s video was called Yoga for Self Doubt. It was a lovely practice with an encouraging and empowering message. I love Adriene so much, I often ask myself how I can be more like her. I walked off the yoga mat today with the intention of being more empowering for my clients and the people who read my blogs. So I decided to simply express encouragement and empowerment on the blog today.

If you came to this website because you were confused or overwhelmed about how to organize your genealogy research, I’m here to tell you that as challenging as it might feel, you can do it. It it feels confusing, just get started and the confusion may clear up for you.

Try to let go of any fear that you’ll do it wrong. First of all, there isn’t a right way to organize your genealogy; there’s just the way that works for you. Secondly if you start on a path that doesn’t work for you, you can always tweak it.

Sometimes it can be helpful to do a do-over. Purchase some software, and start entering in your family tree, including only verified facts and citing your sources to back up those facts. That’s what I did when I abandoned my over 100 pages of hand-written (unsourced) five-generation pedigree charts about ten years ago. I take great comfort in knowing I have a solid tree (and I’m improving my source citations and gleaning more information as I work on my source documentation project this month).

If genealogy ever gets you down, please don’t beat yourself up. Remember you’re fully capable of getting back on course. Take a class. Sign up for next week’s Rootstech virtual conference so you can have access to hundreds of free educational sessions for a year. Keep reading genealogy blogs. Use social media to get advice or find cousins who can help.

If you have specific organizing questions related to genealogy, feel free to reach out to me via email and I’ll see if I can help.

Genealogy is an amazing hobby, but I know from experience it’s easy to feel bogged down or overwhelmed. Please don’t feel discouraged. You got this!

February 30 x 30 mid-month check-in

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Sunday marks the half-way point in our February 30 x 30 challenge, but I though I’d start the check-in a little early. If you are participating in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge, now’s your chance to give us an update in the comments.

I’ve had a good month so far. I’ve researched every day. (I started on January 30, actually, so I’d get 30 days in by the end of February.) Typically, my goal for a 30 x 30 challenge is to do 30 minutes of genealogy research for 30 days in a row. But this time I decided to cut myself some slack. Instead of 30 minutes a day, my goal is to get through 30 source citations in my source documentation checklist. I’m going through my sources in numerical order and checking to make sure that all the information I now put into a source is there (spoiler alert: so far all the source records have lacked information). Also, I’m looking at each source record to see whether I gleaned all the possible information I could from it (not usually). When I set the goal of going through 30 source citations in 30 days I figured that would be very easy to achieve.

It’s not exactly going as planned. I started this 30 x 30 by checking Source 91. Now, 14 days later, I am on Source 98. For a number of the sources, I needed to do some further research in order to verify the information. And you know what? That’s just fine with me. In my research log each day, I’ve written down the next steps I need to do before I’m comfortable moving on to the next source. Since I’m looking at early sources (documents downloaded in 2012 when I was quite new to serious genealogical research), the going is slower. It should pick up when I get to later sources.

Will I manage to get 30 sources by the end of the month? Maybe. But as long as I’m putting in at least some effort each day, I will feel very satisfied. And I’m really enjoying the work. One of the things I love about this challenge is that we can each set our own rules and our own standards for satisfaction.

So please tell me: How’s your personal 30 x 30 challenge going so far?

Quick Tip #14: Back up your data!

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Here’s the next in my occasional 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) post every couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This one is brief but very important.

Back up your data

If you’ve embraced digital file organization, as I have, it’s absolutely imperative to back up your data. And it’s a good idea to do it in multiple ways. I store my genealogy source documents on my hard drive and I back up my hard drive continuously through Backblaze, an automated cloud-based service. (That’s a referral link; I’ll be compensated if you use the link to sign up for BackBlaze.) I’ve been very happy with Backblaze but there are other cloud-based backup services, like Carbonite and CrashPlan, that you might consider.

I also automatically back up hourly to an external hard drive via the Time Machine program on my Mac. (I keep my external hard drive plugged in via a hub whenever my computer is at my desk, which is most of the time.) Finally, my Reunion database is stored on Dropbox, so that I can access it, via ReunionTouch, on my phone. So that’s another place the files exist. I have confidence back up system and, best of all, it’s all automatic–I never have to think about it!

Those are just the ways I back up. There are lots of other ways to do it. The important thing is to feel confident that if your hard drive failed or your computer were stolen or damaged you would not lose your precious genealogy data. If you’re not as confident, I urge you to take some steps to explore how you might improve your situation!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Who’s up for a 30 x 30 challenge?

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February 1 is on Monday and I am itching for a 30 x 30 challenge. Would you like to join me? For the uninitiated, the 30 x 30 challenge is where I challenge myself (and you) to do 30 minutes of genealogy research a day for 30 days in a row. February has only 28 days, so I plan to start tomorrow (January 30). But I think anyone who does daily research (or organizing or whatever other genealogy-related thing you want to do) every day in February can call it a success.

My focus this month will be going through my source documents, which is my goal for 2021. I have an especially long (non-genealogy) task list right now, so I’m giving myself a little grace this month. Instead of asking myself to do 30 minutes of research a day, I’m asking myself to go through one source each day, making sure all the information in it was recorded and that it has a good citation. I’m confident I’ll get more than one source record done a day, so I certainly hope to have more than 30 checked off by the end of this challenge. But it’s daily work that I’m after and I want it to feel easy to accomplish.

How about you? Would you like to join the challenge? Just comment below that you’re in and what you hope to work on (if you’d like to share). I’ll post a mid-month check in and an end-of-the-month wrap up post. I hope the challenge gives that you little push you need to have a wonderfully productive month!