Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

January 2024 30 x 30 challenge wrap up

By 13 Comments

It’s January 31 already! How was your month? Some aspects of my January were great. I participated in Yoga with Adriene’s 30-day yoga journey and did each at-home yoga practice daily without fail. And I met my goal of closing my fitness rings on my Apple Watch every day. My month was focused on health and fitness, not genealogy. So I can report a successful month.

What about your genealogy research? Did your 30 x 30 genealogy challenge go well? Were you able to meet your goals? Did you make any fun discoveries? Please share all in the comments to this post. That wraps it up for this challenge. I plan to do a new 30 x 30 challenge every two or three months, but of course you can always do one on your own!

I look forward to hearing how everything went!

A big milestone: A million page views!

By 4 Comments

I find it hard to believe, but this humble blog has reached what feels to me like a great big milestone. Over the weekend, the number of all-time page views surpassed 1,000,000. Over a million hits since the blog began on June 14, 2022. Amazing. (I took the screenshot at left at 5:54 pm on September 30, 2023.)

I am so grateful to OYFH readers who are so so supportive and so engaged. I’m thrilled that the stats reveal there have been almost 6500 comments in that time!

After 813 posts, it’s safe to say it’s getting a little harder to come up with fresh ideas. So please feel free to let me know in the comments if you have any topics you’d like me to cover on the blog.

Thank you so much for helping me get here!

In praise of the family fan chart

By 3 Comments

Ancestry has added a fan chart as a way to view your pedigree and navigate to direct-line ancestors in your tree. It’s in Beta now and when I checked it out, I really liked what I saw.

In my opinion, the fan chart is so much cleaner and less cluttered than the pedigree charts (horizontal or vertical) offered by Ancestry. (It doesn’t offer green leaves or Thrulines alerts however.) I can click on any ancestor in the chart and be taken to that ancestor’s Ancestry profile.

As an illustration, I’ll share my family chart on Ancestry, from me through my second great grandparents.

Here’s the fan chart:

And here’s the vertical pedigree chart, which had been my preference.

I love how fan charts provide an attractive and easy-to-understand progress of generations. The family-tree software I use on my Mac, Reunion, offers a fan chart too, but it’s not clickable like the Ancestry chart. Here’s what my Reunion fan chart looks like:

I’d be willing to bet that your family-tree software offers a fan chart. In my opinion, it’s worth looking for!

It just occurred to me to see whether Family Search has a fan-chart view and it does! I simply logged in and clicked Tree and there it was. Each ancestor is clickable and you can put a person in the middle of the fan chart by hovering over their section and clicking the fan icon. (I have not connected my husband on the Family Search family tree and rather than ignore that, it looks like Family Search included a blank grid for my husband and our non-existent children.)

Here’s what my Family Search fan chart looks like.

This is getting repetitive, so I’ll stop. I just wanted to take a moment to express my appreciation for fan charts!

Early Bird registration for RootsTech 2024 is open!

By 3 Comments

Next year’s RootsTech will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, February 29 to March 2, 2024. As in the past few years, the conference is also being offered virtually.

That’s five months away, but registration has just opened for both versions of the conference.

As in the past, the virtual conference is free, but you do have to register. Why not register now? Then it will be on your calendar and you can plan around it.

If you’re up for traveling to Salt Lake City, registration is also open for the in-person conference. And right now it’s at an early-bird rate: $99 for a three-day pass and $69 for a one day pass. (I’m not sure what the rate will be going up to.) I’m always amazed and impressed at how inexpensive genealogy conferences tend to be. My professional organization charges $750 to register for its three-day conference!

Why pay $99 plus travel when you can watch from the comfort of your home? I can think of a half dozen reasons off the top of my head:

  • 250+ sessions are offered only in Salt Lake City (though there are 200+ new online sessions).
  • The Expo Hall allows you to learn about genealogy products and services and meet those offering them.
  • You get to really focus on genealogy, rather than trying to wedge it into your day (watching at home is very distracting).
  • You have the opportunity to make friends with other genealogists.
  • You can go to the Family History Library and do your own research!

If you have the budget for it, I encourage you to give attending in person some serious consideration. I attended in 2014, 2016, 2017 (I was a speaker!), 2018, and 2020. (I was a speaker again in 2020…about two weeks later the world shut down). I obviously love this conference, since I keep going back. I’m not planning to go next year, because my priorities have shifted. But I’m sure it will be a terrific conference.