Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Registration open for RootsTech 2023 (in-person and virtual!)

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Interested in attending RootsTech 2023? You have a decision to make. After two years of a virtual conference, RootsTech will be back in 2023 as an in-person event. But the organizers have taken it to a new level: In addition to the traditional in-person conference they will also offer a full virtual experience, with over 200 on-demand classes.

The conference will be held March 2 to 4, 2023 in Salt Lake City, Utah. You can register (for either in person or virtual) on the registration page. The fee for the in-person conference is $98 and registration for the virtual conference is free.

I have to admit, I’m torn. I love RootsTech and all the energy that comes from being with thousands of fellow genealogy enthusiasts and attending classes live and in person. Despite my best intentions, I did not take full advantage of the offerings of the last two virtual RootsTech conferences. (The good news is that it’s not too late to see last year’s sessions!)

I attended (and spoke at) RootsTech 2020, which was held at the very end of February right before the world shut down. I didn’t get sick. I’ve had COVID once and am triple boosted. But I’m still a little wary of attending a large conference. And, of course, with travel expenses, attending the conference in person is a bigger financial commitment. So I may register for the virtual event today and give myself a deadline to decide about attending in person.

How about you? Are you planning to register for either option? If I decide to attend in person, I’ll post here and perhaps we can have a meet up.

(Free) Wikitree conference coming up!

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Yesterday, I sat in on Amy Johnson Crow’s Live YouTube video covering news in the genealogy world. (If you’re not on her mailing list so you hear about these events, I encourage you to sign up!) One of the things she mentioned that I wanted to share with you is Wikitree Day coming up on November 4 and 5. This free genealogy symposium starts on Friday, November 4 at 8 am eastern and runs through 8 pm eastern on Saturday, November 5.

The first day covers general genealogy topics with familiar (and excellent) speakers like Amy Johnson Crow, Thomas MacEntee, Marian Burk Wood and Maureen. Here’s the link for the first day’s schedule. There are one, two or three speakers to choose from in each time slot. The presentations are pre-recorded, which is how they can present them through the night. I noticed that some are repeated; I think this is a great way to reach people in various time zones around the world!

The second day focuses more on Wikitree itself. I have to admit that I’ve never used Wikitree, but Amy extols its virtues and I’m definitely interested in learning more about this collaborative family tree. The second day offers to separate video tracks, so there is plenty to watch. Here’s the schedule.

The conference is free and registration is required. Here’s the link to register. I just registered!

 

 

10 years of Organize Your Family History

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Ten years ago today I published the first post on this blog. That post was titled, My quest to learn more about my family history. In it, I wrote that this blog was going to be about “figuring out what to do, how to do it, how to organize it. I’ll also be sharing the discoveries, the mistakes and the joys that come along the way.” It’s fun to look back on that statement and realize I’ve stayed true to my mission!

I started the blog as a way to help myself get and stay focused on my research. Back in the day, I loved genealogy but was frequently overwhelmed by all the research possibilities. Looking at genealogy through the eyes of a blogger has been very helpful. And writing about organizing genealogy research has helped me in organizing my own research. It’s been a really wonderful marriage of my two big passions, organizing and genealogy.

I’m very proud of this milestone. I love the blog and all the people it’s allowed me to get to know. Writing this blog has helped me learn (and teach) so much.

Here are a few stats about the blog. Over these ten years I’ve:

  • posted 753 posts, including this one:
  • had a total of 933,452 pageviews (closing in on a million!)
  • received more than 6,000 comments (counting my responses)

My most-read post is Reading hard-to-read gravestones which has been viewed a whopping 54,972 times since I posted it on July 1, 2014.

To mark the anniversary, I’m offering a special discount on Orderly Roots Bundle. Use the promo code HAPPYBIRTHDAY at checkout to get $10 off the $39.99 bundle of four guides (which includes my newest guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow) now through Saturday, June 18.

Thank you for being a valued reader of this blog!

Photo by Morgan Lane on Unsplash

 

Are old photos hiding from you?

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I just spent a really rewarding nine days in my hometown of Walla Walla, Washington. I helped my 91-year-old father, Gene Adams, move into a lovely assisted living place. He’s really happy there and I’m feeling so good that he’s content and safe.

As part of my time in Walla Walla, I emptied his condominium so we could put it on the market. He and my mother bought the condo in 1991 and while my dad wasn’t a big accumulator of stuff (thank goodness), there was a basement storage room that I had not spent much time in. When it came time to empty the storage room, I discovered box upon box of old family photos and other ephemera. (One of the photos was the one of my brothers and me taken in about 1965 that’s at the top of this post.)

I was simultaneously thrilled and disappointed to find these photos. Thrilled because I can’t wait to carefully go through them. Disappointed because I would have loved to have gone through them with my mother when she was alive. She died in 2015 at 82 from Parkinson’s disease and in her last years wasn’t very mobile. We could have had a lovely time talking about and organizing these photos together.

So that leads me to a question for you: Are there family photos tucked out of sight in your home or in the homes of your relatives? Could you uncover them and enjoy them with your family members? It might be worthwhile to think about who you might ask and, of course, what you might do with them.

In addition to the boxes that were in my dad’s condo’s storage room, I also went through boxes of photos and documents that had come from my aunt’s home. When she moved into a care facility in February, I had these boxes delivered to my father’s condo to go through later. “Later” came very quickly! There are some treasures there as well. (And there were a lot of papers that she didn’t need to keep that added to my task. I blogged about that on my organizing blog yesterday.)

In all, I had seven boxes shipped to my home from Walla Walla. They should arrive at the end of the week. I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t overwhelmed at the prospect of how I’m going to deal with them. My plan right now is to use Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box methodology to get started. I’m so grateful to have that starting point.

Keep an eye out for more posts as I go through this stuff! I’m sure it will be an organizing challenge that perhaps we can all benefit from.