Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

August 30 x 30 wrap up: How’d it go?

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Our August 30 x 30 challenge is over and I’d love to hear how it went for you. Were you able to do genealogy research for 30 minutes a day? If not, did the challenge prompt you get more done than you might otherwise have? Do you have any achievements to share?

I had a great month. I researched every day, though I didn’t always do the full 30 minutes. This month I kept a spreadsheet of my daily progress on reducing my backlog of downloaded documents that need to be processed. One of the fields in that spreadsheet is how much time I spent each session. The Numbers spreadsheet understands minutes and hours so I can easily glance at the sum for that column and see that I spent 17 hours and 20 minutes researching in August (including 20 minutes yesterday, which is technically past the 30-day challenge). That’s an average of 33 minutes and 32 seconds a day. That feels great!!

The bad news is that I only reduced my backlog by 24 documents, which is kind of sad. Mostly that’s because I downloaded 40 documents in August, despite my pledge that I would resist downloading. So that means I processed 64 documents, which doesn’t sound quite as pathetic.

In any case, I enjoyed this month’s research and, as always, felt I benefited from doing it daily. I love the connection I maintain with my research when I work on it daily.

How about you? If you participated in the challenge, please let us know how this month went!

Handwriting: One of the challenges of census research

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Censuses are such a great friend to genealogists. They’ve been digitized and indexed. From 1850 forward they supply household members’ names. And every ten years you get a new batch to work with.

There are lots of reasons to take what’s mentioned in a census with a grain of salt, like the competence of the enumerator or the knowledge of the informant.

But one of the big challenges with census research is handwriting. It’s not just that handwriting has changed through time, so older writing looks unfamiliar.  Often the enumerator seems to have lousy handwriting. (Isn’t it wonderful when you come across a census whose enumerator had perfect penmanship?)  He/she was probably tired after a hard day of knocking on doors. So it’s important to remember when dealing with censuses that a name may not be what it looks like.

This week I’ve been doing tiny projects for my organizing blog and today when I was cleaning out my under-the-desk file cart, I came across a piece a paper I’d created some years ago with census entries for one of my collateral relatives, Henrietta Adams Timmons, daughter of George Washington Adams (1845-1938), whom I write about a lot here. She was living with her father, George, stepmother Della and son, Louis Quincy, in the 1910 census. In the 1920 census was living with her husband, Magellan Timmons, and children Louis, Clayetta and George.

Check out these images from the 1910 and 1920 censuses, respectively. I wrote the names of the people next to the census image.

You can see that Louis’ name is practically indecipherable (and he appears to be called Quincy in 1920, though that’s hardly legible); Magellan has become Michael and Clayetta looks like Sylelta (maybe)? It’s no surprise that Della was indexed Lellar.

The worst part about the bad handwriting of the 1910 census is that the enumerator was George Washington Adams himself!

Of course poor handwriting makes indexing really difficult. Sometimes that means you have to browse, rather than search for your people. I guess my takeaway is that I come across conflicting or confusing names for someone in my family tree, I need to consider whether handwriting might be the culprit.

The benefits (and challenges) of cleaning up your research area

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Over on my organizing blog, I’m doing a Tiny Projects challenge, in which each day this week I am accomplishing one tiny organizing project in my home and blogging about it. Today, I tackled the reach-in closet in my office. (You can read about it and see the before and after pictures here.) That closet holds mostly genealogy stuff.

Since I don’t print or download genealogy documents, I don’t have a lot of paper genealogy clutter. But when I spent a half hour creating order in that closet I realized that I have some genealogy-related projects lurking in there that weren’t even on my radar.

I discovered that I had a bunch of photos of ancestors–I didn’t look at them carefully but they look to be 50-100 years old or more. I’m sure they were passed along to me by a relative and my intention is to scan and file them in my genealogy filing system. They were scattered on the surface of the main shelf in the closet. That closet is equipped with an Elfa system (I blogged about that back in the day when I installed it). There is one larger shelf that could serve as a desk. So while I was tidying and organizing, I gathered up the photos and put them in a container that I labeled “photos to process” and placed it on the main shelf so it can’t hide from me.

I also have a container full of genealogy journals to read. I added to it today. It’s really just the two publications that the National Genealogical Society sends to its members, as well as the Missouri genealogical society’s journal. Back in January 2019, I vowed to skim them, but in fact I haven’t.

I feel I need to fish or cut bait here. Either I carve out some time to read them (perhaps during an October 30 x 30 challenge?) or decide I’m not going to read them and then find them a home with someone else.

I rather like the idea of devoting 30 minutes a day for a month (or less if it goes more quickly) to see what I can glean from these publications. But it can’t be this month!

I’m really glad I cleaned out this closet, but I’m a little sad that two big projects emerged (the photos and the journals). I can’t believe I’m complaining about it, though. These are treasures I’m fortunate to possess, not burdens to be dealt with!

If it’s been awhile since you cleaned up your genealogy space, you may have some pleasant surprises hiding in there!

30 x 30: Time for a mid-month check in!

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For those of you who are participating in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge (in which we endeavor to do 30 minutes of genealogy research every day for 30 days), how’s it going? It’s almost halfway through the month. Have you found that the challenge is prompting to you to get more research (or organizing) done than you might have otherwise?

I’ve had a great couple of weeks. I’ve researched every day. A couple of those sessions were shorter than 30 minutes. One was about five minutes, just so I wouldn’t break the chain of daily research. This month I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of my efforts at reducing my backlog and I included a column on how much time I spent. So I can tell you that in 13 days , I have spent 6 hours and 45 minutes researching. (I think it’s very cool that Numbers allows me to enter minutes then totals it up for me in hours.) That’s an average of 31 minutes a day. Woot!

I have been focusing on eliminating my backlog of unprocessed documents, though it’s going more slowly than I might have hoped. I have so far reduced the backlog by 24 documents. I’m finding that the processing is revealing questions and mysteries that are diverting me a little. But I have added only three new documents in the last two weeks! In any case, this slow and steady approach has been enjoyable. And the short, daily sessions is keeping me in touch with my research, which is always a great benefit.

I am confident that I would not have prioritized research if it weren’t for the challenge. I am so grateful to all of you for providing me with accountability.

Your turn: If you’re among the 30 or so folks who signed on to the challenge (or even you didn’t sign on but are participating), please let the rest of us know how it’s going!

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When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.