Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Avoiding tunnel vision

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Avoid tunnel vision in your genealogy researchI’ve been thinking quite a bit this fall about staying focused, since I spoke on that topic at the St. Louis Genealogy Conference. Focus is  such an important element in making progress in my research. I’m easily overwhelmed by all the possibilities of things to research and I strive to maintain my focus so I can avoid both overwhelm and distractions.

But there’s such a thing as being too focused, I think. Recently I’ve been revisiting early sources in my tree that I found a half decade or more ago. I’m so glad I’m doing it because I’m finding all sorts of things I missed the first time around. For example, on more than one occasion, I’ve re-examined a census document I’d downloaded for one ancestor family to find that another ancestor family–unrelated to the first one–was also on the page.

That reminded me how important it is to examine the whole census page when you find one. And it’s a great idea to expand your scan to a page or two before or after. Our ancestors tended to live near one another and families intermarried. You might end up finding a relative who hadn’t been indexed correctly. Or you might just learn more about your family.

Another even more obvious example of the pitfalls of tunnel vision is the tendency to focus on direct-line relatives. I learned the hard way that it’s important to collect information on all relatives who appear on a census, not just those from whom you descend. I remember back when I was starting out that the idea of recording information on all the collateral relatives felt tedious and overwhelming. That may be true. But these siblings of your ancestors might play key roles in solving puzzles down the road or in helping prove a document applies to your relative’s family and not another family. Trust me, if you expand your exploration (and documentation) to include all your collateral relatives, you’ll be glad you did later.

I recently revisited a marriage document from 1905. The marriage book contained the record for my great grandparents on the right-hand page of a two-page spread. What I simply hadn’t noticed before was that the on left-hand page of that spread was the marriage license for my great grandmother’s sister! Way back then I might have not taken the trouble to record the information, even if I’d noticed it. But now, I’m excited to add this family to my tree and it’s been a springboard for further exploration.

Those are just a few small examples of the benefits of avoiding tunnel vision even while you stay focused. If you can think of others, please share in the comments!

Photo by Angel Origgi on Unsplash

What are your genealogy goals?

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I don’t know if it’s because I’m a professional organizer or if it’s just how I’m wired, but I love setting goals. I set goals for my personal life, my genealogy life, and, of course, my organizing business every year. I typically take a one-day retreat (I detailed how that works in this blog post on my organizing blog last year) devoted to reviewing last year’s goals and setting goals for the coming year.

These are the genealogy goals I set for 2018:

  • Come up with a scheme for keeping me focused
  • Index at least four hours a month at Family Search
  • Attend at least three genealogy conferences
  • Attend at least one week-long institute
  • Go on a research trip
  • Improve my research log and/or my capturing of tasks
  • Add 300 sources to Reunion
  • Create the habit of researching daily

In looking at them today, I’m feeling pretty good, except for the indiexing. Not only did I do no indexing, I didn’t even remember that I wanted to index! Here’s the rest of the scorecard:

  • I feel like I became much more focused in my research–sticking with the Adams line the first six months and shifting to the Rasco line in the latter half of the year helped me stay focused on my research in general. And my short sessions have kept me quite focused.
  • I attended three genealogy conferences: RootsTech in Salt Lake City, the Missouri State Genealogical Association conference in Columbia, Missouri and the St. Louis Genealogy Conference. In addition, I attended a House History workshop from the Missouri Historical Society and a day-long DNA workshop presented by Diahan Southard, sponsored by the St. Louis Genealogical Society.
  • I had to shelve my goal of attending a week-long institute and taking a research trip because my husband was laid off this year and it didn’t seem prudent. He’s happily employed now, so perhaps I can add those things to my 2019 goals.
  • I’m not sure I improved my research log but I did improve my frequency of use. The habit of recording my research activities every session (informally in Evernote) is now ingrained. That’s huge!
  • I was sure I’d added 300 sources to Reunion until I looked. I have just shy of 900 sources and added 185 of them in 2018. I think that goal was just unrealistic.
  • As for daily research, I did better some months than others. These last two months have been much more spotty. But according to my research log, I rocked it in January, February, March, July, August and October. I feel pretty good about that, though there’s room for improvement.

My annual retreat this year will be on December 26. Once again, I’ll include my genealogy research goals in the planning process. Incidentally, a tool that I’ll be using in the process is the Good Enough Goal Setting workbook + audio that my  Getting to Good Enough podcast co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and I created. I encourage you to check it out!

Do you set goals for your genealogy research? Please feel free to share them in the comments, if you’d like!

 

Reconnecting with my ancestors

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I miss my ancestors. November was a crazy month–in the first half I was busy with some big projects for my organizing clients and in the second half I was hosting a visit from my brother, Larry and his daughter, Miranda, who live in Australia. Then the three of us left to go visit my father in Walla Walla, Washington. That’s where I am now.

Looking at my research log, I see that I researched exactly once in November 2018. That is unacceptable and such a far cry from the almost-daily research I’d been enjoying.

Even though my routines are still messed up by traveling, at the beginning of December I pressed reset and started back with daily research. I missed yesterday, but I hope not to miss any more days this month. If I do, I’ll cut myself some slack and get right back on board.

This morning, I re-read a post I’d written in May 2017 where I talked about circumstances leading up to a (much briefer) research hiatus. In that post, I talked about the fall-back projects I have where I can make a little progress in a brief period of time and keep the daily research going, even if it’s very brief.

I’m so glad I read it and was reminded of my source documentation project from 2016, where I started going back through my sources, making sure they were cited consistently and that all the relevant data was extracted from each document. I also make sure that an image of the source document is attached to the source record in Reunion.

I’ve found that over the last half dozen years, I’ve become a more skilled researcher. Back in the day, I missed a lot, so this is a really worthwhile endeavor. When I started checking my source documentation in 2016 I had 300 sources and I’ve checked 85 of them. Two and a half years later, I have 896 sources. I’d like to think that at some point I’ll decide that I can stop checking the sources because I knew what I was doing and there’s nothing to be gained. I can’t wait to find out at what point that happened!

Unless feel like exploring something else, I’ll stick to reviewing my source documents for the rest of the year as I think about my genealogy goals for 2019. I’m excited to get back in the swing of things and reconnect with my ancestors!

Edited to add: During today’s source documentation checking, I discovered that my great grandmother’s sister was married the same day she was. My 2nd great aunt and her husband are on the same scan of the marriage record book as my great grandparents. Shame on me for missing that, but I’m so glad I was able to add a person to my tree simply by checking my sources!

On Thanksgiving, we’re creating history for our descendants

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Two years ago, I wrote this Thanksgiving post. I ran it again last year and now I’ve decided to make it an annual tradition. Enjoy!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.)

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

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