Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Surprise December 30 x 30 challenge!

By 24 Comments

My plan was to wait until January for my next 30 x 30 challenge, since that seems like a logical time for one. But I desperately need one now, so I’m going for it. Who would like to join me in committing to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or genealogy organizing or whatever your goals are) every day for 30 days in a row?

I loved doing my 30 minutes a day of research in October, yet I could not sustain it in November in the absence of a challenge. The public accountability of the 30 x 30 challenge really helps me elevate genealogy to the top of my priority list. I know that December is a busy time for many people but December 2020 is special, isn’t it? Maybe this will give you the motivation you need to fit in some genealogy as well.

Just let me know in the comments if you want to participate. We’ll do a mid-month check in and an end-of-the month wrap up. I feel like it’s going to be a great way to set ourselves up for a productive 2021!

New + improved search capability

By Leave a Comment

I don’t know if you noticed, but a few months ago the Search field disappeared from this blog. I think it was the result of a WordPress update (or perhaps a theme update), but it up and vanished.

I set up and maintain Organize Your Family History on my own but I’m far from a WordPress expert and my efforts to figure out what had happened flailed. Figuring it out was on my task list forever and, finally, I decided to purchase Jetpack Search so that readers would once again be able to search for topics of interest on this site.

In implementing Jetpack Search, I learned that I could no longer use the old location for the Search. (It used to be up at the top, to the right of the menu items.) I’ve now located it in the right sidebar, between my photo and the tag cloud.

I’m excited that the new Jetpack Search is more robust than the old default search used to be. When you search on a term, an overlay window comes up that shows your results, including results that appeared in comments (shown just below the post to which the comment was made). When you’re finished, you just click the X at the top right of the screen to go back to the blog page. Another thing I’m happy about is that, as with Google, if you mistype a word it will try to figure out what you meant. For example, I accidentally typed “Barru” and the search results for “Barry” (my husband’s name) appeared.

If you were inconvenienced by the absence of a Search field for a number of months, I apologize and I thank you for not complaining. I hope you find the new, more robust, search capability helpful!

Check out Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box

By 2 Comments

Back in April, I wrote an enthusiastic blog post about my favorite RootsTech 2020 presentation, Do Something with That Box from Stacy Julian. She kindly gave me permission to reprint her helpful handout because she hadn’t written about it on her own website.

I was delighted to see that last month she published a robust blog post on the topic that fleshes out what I wrote about. It’s called How to BEGIN with the Box and I urge you to check it out, even if you’ve read my post. It provides great detail and it includes the downloadable pdf of the handout, along with photos and explanations.

When I drove to Walla Walla in September, I took the opportunity to bring home a box of family stuff. It’s not so much documents as photos, but I intend to use Stacy’s framework as I go through it. (The box been sitting unopened for almost six weeks now…I think our stay-at-home holiday time will be a good time to address it.)

If you have a box of family memorabilia to go through, do yourself a favor and check out her terrific post. You can thank me (well, really, Stacy) later.

Ancestry users: Don’t forget to check Family Search

By 20 Comments

My go-to genealogy resource is Ancestry.com. I find the search interface easy to use and I frequently find it helpful when I’m trying to answer a research question. I pretty much ignore the hints and I almost never consult public trees. I’m there for the vast number of documents in their collections.

But I had a couple of experiences while researching this week that reminded me not to overlook Family Search, even when I’ve found a pertinent document at Ancestry. Family Search (the LDS church’s genealogy website) sometimes has better scans or more accurate indexes of the same collections. And they may have expanded collections.

I blogged back in August 2018 in a post called No need to settle for bad scans about how I found a document on Family Search that was poorly scanned at Ancestry. It happened again this week when I was researching the family of my third great grandfather, Henry S. Garlock (1817-1909). The issue was that the main information in the 1885 Iowa census was legible, but the column headers were fuzzy. So I did a Google search looking for an explanation of the column headers. And that led me to a much more clear scan at Family Search.

Here they are side by side (click the photo to see them larger):

The next day, working on this same family, I was examining a document I’d downloaded from Ancestry that was for the 1905 Iowa census. It provided so little information I clicked on  “About this collection” on Ancestry and all it said was, “This collection includes census records from Iowa in 1905. You can learn more about this collection at the FamilySearch website.” When I clicked on that link I discovered that the 1905 Iowa Census consisted of individual cards for each person and the page I’d downloaded from Ancestry was simply an index to those cards!

This is the census document I found on Ancestry:

And this is an example of one of the cards. So much more information!

It was nice to have this important reminder to check more than one repository for important information. I hope it helps you!