Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Do you use Reunion?

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If you’re like me and use Reunion for Macintosh as your genealogy software, you’ll probably be interested in learning that there is a virtual Reunion Users Group organized by the San Diego Genealogy Society that meets on Zoom. It’s free and open to the public and the next meeting is on Tuesday, 2 April 2024 at 12 pm Pacific time. The topic will be on the new version of the software, Reunion 14, and the speaker will be Anne Alves. Here’s the page with a link to register.

I am so grateful to reader Marian Kowalski who frequently shares great tips and resources. I appreciate her taking the time to email me about this users group. If you have ideas for blog posts or want me to share resources of interest, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at janine@organizeyourfamilyhistory.com.

Other great learning resources for Reunion include Leister’s ReunionTalk forum and the Reunion Software Users Group on Facebook. My How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow is a 37-page pdf download explaining how I organize my genealogy research. Since I use Reunion, all the examples are shown in Reunion 13.

If you recommend other Reunion resources, please share them in the comments!

It’s RootsTech time!

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RootsTech snuck up on me this year because, for the first time in a decade, I’m not planning to attend, either in-person or virtually. As I’ve explained here, I’m not focusing on my genealogy research this year (though I still enjoy maintaining Organize Your Family History!) and instead using the time to focus on building my YNAB budget coaching practice

But I wanted to share a couple of resources in case RootsTech snuck up on you as well. It will be held both in-person in Salt Lake City and virtually 29 February to 2 March, 2024. Online registration is free; in-person registration for all three days of the event is $109 if you register before 29 February and $129 if you register on site. To register, just go to the Rootstech website and choose which experience you want.

To me, $109 registration for the in-person conference is the bargain of the century. I loved attending in person. Being among thousands of genealogy enthusiasts and taking the classes in person is an unforgettable experience and I’m so glad I was able to attend five conferences. Participating in the conference online is also a great experience, though it’s much easier to get distracted by real life.

The conference has so many classes (more than 200!) it can feel overwhelming to choose what to attend. RootsTech has a created a terrific blog post detailing how to plan your RootsTech 2024 schedule, whether you’re attending in person or online.

Are you planning to attend? If so, what are you most excited about?

I hope this year’s RootsTech is a great experience for all of you who attend!

Four habits to make your research easier

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I stumbled on this post I wrote a year ago and I liked it so much I thought I would share it again. Creating great habits in any aspect of your life tends to make your life easier. The more we can do habitually, the less we have to think about doing it. I encourage you to consider incorporating these four habits into your genealogy life!

I’m a huge fan of creating beneficial habits. When you have a habit going, it becomes automatic–at least for awhile! And when that happens, life gets easier. (You might enjoy listening to Episode 22 of the podcast I co-hosted, Getting to Good Enough, called Creating Helpful Habits.)

I got to thinking about the genealogy habits that benefit me and four jumped to mind. Your future self will thank you if you do these four things every time you research:

  1. Rename the files you download. Having a consistent file-naming protocol will help make sure you don’t lose valuable documents on your hard drive. (See this blog post if you’re interested in my file-naming protocol and folder structure.)
  2. Process each document right after you download it. By process, I mean extract all the data from it and enter it in your genealogy software. Be sure to create a source citation (see #3 below). If you do this, you won’t have an ever-present backlog of unprocessed documents nagging at you. And you get to further your research!
  3. Create a source citation for every document and assign a source to every fact. In my genealogy life no fact goes into my database (I use Reunion) without a source citation. That’s how I know I can trust my research. (And so can other people.)
  4. Log your research during each session or, at the very least, write out your next steps. It is so useful to be able to pull up your research log and see where you left off. It eliminates that overwhelming question, “What should I research today?” (Here’s a post on my very informal research log.)

The good news is that while these habits are important, they’re not hard. I encourage you to work on creating great genealogy habits. It can take some of the frustration out of the research process. You want your genealogy research to be as frustration-free as possible!

For detailed information on how I organize my own genealogy research, check out my Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow, available for $19.99.

Quick Tip #44: When in doubt, leave it out

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Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every now and then on a small topic that pops into my head. This one is a good adage to apply to your genealogy research.

When in doubt, leave it out

If you want to build a reliable tree, you need to be very careful about what you add to it. If you’re not sure that an ancestor you’ve come across in your research is your ancestor, don’t add that person to your tree until you’ve done more research to verify that this is your person. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the clue; you can park it somewhere. I use follow-up folders organized by surname in Apple Notes to store that information. (I am in the process of switching over to Apple Notes from Evernote for my research log and follow up folders.)

This applies to sources, as well as people.  I don’t add any fact to my tree that I can’t back up with a source. And I want to make sure it’s a reliable source before I add it to the tree.

As someone who created a very unreliable tree in the beginning, I think it’s worthwhile to take a slow and meticulous approach to make sure that my tree is rock solid.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

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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.