Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

How’d the June 30 x 30 go?

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June is behind us, as is another 30 x 30 challenge. How did things go for you? Did you manage to meet your goal of 30 minutes of genealogy research/organizing for 30 days (or whatever your alternate goal was)? If not, did you do more than might have done without the challenge? Please report in!

My month didn’t go exactly as planned, due to competing responsibilities. But I definitely put in more than 15 hours, thanks to my genealogy research trip. I had hoped to expend daily effort on planning the trip, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, the planning went in spurts of larger amounts of time. And then, of course, I had the trip itself, which I took the last week in June. That week alone, I spent more than 30 hours doing genealogy research. So I’m calling this challenge a success, even if my approach wasn’t exactly 30 x 30esque.

I’ll write about my trip in Friday’s post. In the meantime, those of you who took on the challenge please use the comments to let us know how it went!

Preliminary lessons in planning my research trip

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Tomorrow’s the big day. I’m going to leave bright and early to travel to McLean County, Kentucky, where I haven’t been for five years. I have been preoccupied with planning it for the last month or more and now it’s time to pack up my stuff and go. After a day in McLean, I’ll move on to Owensboro for the morning, then Frankfort, where I’ll stay three nights. I’ve been very keen to do a lot of planning so I wouldn’t waste any time while I was there. I actually placed a lot of pressure on myself, I think.

Time will tell whether I’m right, but here are the initial lessons I feel I’ve learned:

  • At some point I had to call it done. I was poring over repositories’ catalogs and my family tree, trying to fine-tune my lookups and I realized I needed to decide I’ve finished, pack up and relax.
  • Less is more. When I initially started planning this trip, I though I’d spend time in Louisville and Bowling Green repositories, but after taking a realistic look at the time I had available, I decided to pare the trip down to just three locations. That gives me more breathing room, which feels much better.
  • The little repositories are as intriguing as the big ones. Kentucky has some great repositories for genealogists in Frankfort and I can’t wait to explore them. But I’m equally excited to visit the McLean County Historical and Genealogical Museum just three blocks from my B&B in Calhoun. I’m confident the folks there will point me to resources I couldn’t find elsewhere. I will also visit the Genealogy Room of the McLean County Public Library in Livermore to see what I might find there. And I’m excited to pay another visit to the Kentucky Room of the Daviess County Public Library in Owensboro where I hope to do some newspaper research on some indexed articles (obits mostly) about ancestors. I’m also looking forward to seeing their vertical files.
  • It’s important to build in some flexibility. Five years ago, when I took a trip to both Kentucky and Alabama, I was so glad I allowed myself some flexibility to change things up. I ended up staying longer in Kentucky and lopping the more distant Alabama destination off my itinerary.  This time, I’m allowing myself the option to stay away an extra day if need be. And I have a just-in-case plan to go to Louisville, if I tap out early on the resources in Frankfort.
  • I can’t necessarily count on technology. I’m going to stay at a B&B in the tiny town of Calhoun, Kentucky, where my ancestors live. When I spoke with the owner last week, she mentioned that the internet was down in the entire town that day. She hoped it would be back. What? I’m planning my trip in Trello, but it requires the internet in order for me to access it. I’m assuming I’ll have cell phone service, but sometimes that can be spotty. So I’m doing something I don’t do much of: I’m printing out the things I’d be lost without (both literally and figuratively) that day.
  • Depth beats breadth. I have a lot of ancestors who lived in Kentucky, particularly in McLean County. I’ve been figuring out what resources not available on the Internet I might be able to find out about them when I’m on this trip. As part of the prep for this trip, I’ve spent more time looking into my 2nd great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1845-1938)–whom I thought I had known pretty well. Well, newspaper research this month revealed something I hadn’t known: he was a member of state legislature in the last decade of the 19th century. So I’ve decided I’d really like to spend time in McLean researching context so I can understand more about how he lived. (I heard a great talk from Elizabeth Shown Mills on context at the NGS conference, which is inspiring me.) That might mean I find out fewer facts about other ancestors, but I’m okay with that. And, of course, the context I learn will help me with other ancestors who lived in that time and place as well.
  • I’m going to be kind to myself. I have high hopes for this trip, but if they don’t all pan out, that’ll be okay. I know it’s not going to be perfect and I won’t kick myself when I realize what I could have done differently. I’m staying at an AirBnb in Frankfort and while I hope my evenings will involve some planning for the next day, I also plan to let myself relax. I also plan to eat well. I’m fortunate that I love spending time by myself, so hanging out on my own in an AirBnb is my idea of a good time.

I’ve literally been thinking about this trip for years. I feel I’ve prepared well. We shall see whether I’ve over- or under-prepared. I will certainly let you all know how it goes!

 

Mid-month 30 x 30 update

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It’s June 18 already! Where did the month go? Back on June 1, I started a new 30 x 30 challenge, where I commited to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or research-related activities) for 30 days. I great group of you decided to join the challenge.

So it’s time for a mid-month report. How’s it going? Please let us know in the comments.

I have to be honest and say it’s not going how I expected. My priority has been planning my research trip to Kentucky and I’m confident I’ve put in 9 hours (18 days x 30 minutes) this month, but it hasn’t been 30 minutes at a time. I’ve had longer sessions and have not been able to put in daily effort. (It’s been a busy time for my organizing business, so I just haven’t had that much freedom in my schedule this month.)

Planning this trip has been a journey. (No pun intended.) I leave on the 24th and I’m finished with the planning. (I did score what looks like a great AirBnB in Frankfort, just a two-minute walk from the Kentucky Historical Society!) I can’t wait to see how the trip works out and you can bet I’ll be talking about it here. I intend to write an Orderly Roots guide about planning a trip as well. And I proposed to speak on planning a research trip at RootsTech in February. (Time will tell whether that’s accepted.)

So I haven’t met my intended goal with this month’s 30 x 30 but I’m feeling okay about the time spent. How’s the challenge going for you?

Keeping track of learning resources

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve purchased a lot of educational products surrounding genealogy. And I somehow hope I’m not alone when I confess that I have not read/viewed the majority of what I’ve purchased.

A big part of the problem is that the products are typically downloaded and I don’t have a great system for storing them where I’ll find them again. I also don’t have a great memory, so I often forget I’ve even made the purchase.

I decided to try to do something about this. I created a Trello board called G: Learning Resources. (I use the G prefix before all my genealogy-related Trello boards.) Within that board, I created some lists, by topic or source. Then I combed my hard drive for these downloaded documents. I’m not finished yet, but I found a lot in my Genealogy folder. Some were in subfolders, so there was at least an attempt at organization. (I even had one called Learning Resources to Read that I don’t remember creating and haven’t looked at in years.) I created notes for each of the individual resources and attached either the document or a path to the document to each note. For smaller documents, like short pdfs, I attached the document itself to the note in Trello. For resources larger than 10 megabytes (the Trello limit for attachments for the free version), I’ve added the path to the file on my hard drive in the description area of the note.

I’m just getting started but here’s a portion of that Trello board. (You can click on the image to see a larger version.)

Janine's Learning Resources Trello Board

 

And here’s an example of an individual note. It’s for the slide deck from a talk on Ancestry. At the top of this post is another note I created for a webinar that consisted of bunch of different files on different topics.

Now that my resources are together I think I have a fighting chance of actually benefiting from them. A giant find today was the screencast that Diahan Southard had made of a personal consultation we had back in 2015. I knew she’d sent it to me and had tried unsuccessfully to find it on my hard drive last year. (The problem was that it had my name, not hers, in the file name, since she had created it.) So I renamed it, added it to my Trello board and am take great comfort in knowing I’ll be able to find it when I turn my attention back to my DNA research.

Trello allows for Labels (like tags) to be added to individual notes. So when I have more time to spend with it, I’ll think I’ll add some labels, including a “Read” one so I can mark the resources I actually read.

This has been great for corralling my backlog and making it accessible. As a bonus, I think it will help me be more mindful about future purchases. Since I’ll easily be able to see what I already have, I may purchase less (and money). And now I have a place to put those purchases. I can add newly purchased resources to my Learning Resources Trello board and tag them with a “New” or “2019” label so they don’t get lost among the older stuff.

I feel like this will work for me. I’m interested, though, in how you keep track of your learning resources. Please share in the comments!

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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.