Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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

How you can profit from daily research

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I’m planning to start a new 30 x 30 challenge on January 1. I’ve been doing these challenges periodically for eight years and they’ve been helpful to many people (including me). Come January 1, I’ll be asking you to commit to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or genealogy organizing, or really anything you want to commit to) for 30 days in a row. What’s the value of the commitment? If you’ve done a 30 x 30 challenge already, you probably know. But if you haven’t, you might be inspired this post, which I originally wrote on November 3, 2017. Watch for an introductory post to the challenge on New Year’s Day!

The benefits of dailiy genealogy researchI know some of you work on genealogy research every day. But I think the majority of folks are like I once was. I’d wait until I had a free day or half day on the weekend before I’d do any research. And sometimes when that day finally came I’d be paralyzed with all the choices of things to research and very slow to start. Very occasionally, I wouldn’t get anything done because I couldn’t decide!

This year, I’ve been trying hard to research daily. As I mentioned in this introducing a new 30 x 30 challenge, I haven’t missed a day since August 1. That feels great.

It got me thinking about some of the advantages to short, frequent research sessions over long, infrequent ones. Here’s what I came up with.

  1. I’m more connected with my ancestors. Because I’m thinking about them every single day, I don’t have to review everything in order to get started.
  2. I forget less. In addition to researching daily I’m also keeping a very informal research log in Evernote that helps me stay on top of what I’ve researched.
  3. I keep a “next steps” list in my  research log so I know exactly what to work on when I sit down to research in the morning. Overwhelm and paralysis is a thing of the past!
  4. I stay focused. I don’t have the luxury of going down rabbit holes when my timer is going and I know I’ll have to stop before long. This does a great job of keeping me focused. When I’m tempted to get distracted, I just add the bright shiny object to my genealogy task list.
  5. I’ve created a habit! Doing 30 minutes of genealogy research is a great way to start the day. It used to be I’d forget to research. No more. It’s part of my routine and I love it.
  6. It’s easier for me to find 30 minutes a day (3.5 hours a week) than a weekly half day or biweekly full day to research. Taking a whole weekend once a month feels pretty much impossible. I still love having longer sessions–it’s truly a special day when I spend the whole day researching. (Thankfully, I have had a few of those this year.) But daily research means that researching is getting done without my feeling like I’m sacrificing other things.

I really do enjoy longer sessions and I consider those a bonus. This year’s daily research, which is usually a minimum of 30 minutes, means that 2017 will be my most productive year yet when it comes to family history research. And from a time perspective, it’s been really easy!