Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Speaking topic suggestions?

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questionmarkI’m going to be giving a talk again at the St. Louis Genealogy Conference, which will be held October 13. I’ve been given a choice of repeating last year’s session, which was on Going Paperless in Your Genealogy Research, or coming up with a different topic.

I’m on the fence. On the one hand, it would be really easy to repeat last year’s session, on a topic I enjoy. I’ve already prepared it and I have a Powerpoint presentation ready. (Though I’d probably update the talk a little.) But on the other hand, I’ll grow if I develop a new presentation, and it will keep things more interesting for me. Plus repeat attendees who went to my talk last year will have the option of hearing a new talk from me.

But what would I speak about? The one topic I’ve thought of is Staying Focused in your Genealogy Research.

I thought I’d turn to you my blog readers, because you always have great ideas. Most of you probably aren’t going to be in a position to hear this talk in St. Louis, but perhaps one day I’ll speak at a conference near you.

In the comments, please tell me what topic, within the genealogy organizing arena, you would want to hear a 60-minute presentation about. I would appreciate your input!

My first article in Family Tree Magazine!

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I’m excited to report that an article I wrote is published in the current (July/August 2018) edition of Family Tree Magazine! It’s called Genealogy Organization Secrets the Pros Know and it’s based on the interviews I did for the What the Pros Know: Genealogy Organizing Tips workshop I hosted for Family Tree University earlier this year.

The expert sources for the article are Thomas MacEntee, Joshua Taylor, Drew Smith, and Denise Levenick. I’m so grateful to them for talking with me.

For ten years before I started my organizing business in 2005, I was a freelance pet writer. I wrote primarily for newspapers and magazines, though in the latter years I wrote books. (You can check out my titles at Amazon.)

So magazine writing is not new for me, but I have to admit it was a thrill to have a genealogy article appear under my byline in a major national magazine. And note the optimism in this post’s title…I’m hoping there will be more!

I was able to read the article through this link, though it may be for premium members only. You can purchase and download the whole digital edition of the magazine here.

While it’s nice to see digital version on the website, I’m looking forward to holding the physical magazine in my hands. (Never mind that usually prefer digital documents to paper. This is different!)

Shifting my focus

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My strategy for focusing my genealogy efforts in 2014Looking back at May, I realize that I wasn’t able to research a whole lot. Life got very hectic in the middle of the month when my husband was in a bad car accident that left him unharmed but his car very harmed. It was a total loss and we had to shop for a new car, which is always surprisingly time consuming. Between that and his negotiating for and accepting a new job, I probably went two weeks without doing any genealogy research.

I love doing daily research, so this made me feel really disconnected from my ancestors. Over Memorial Day weekend, I got back into it, thank goodness. I went to my research log and was reminded that I’d been transcribing deeds recently.

I’m here to tell you that transcribing deeds isn’t my idea of a great time. Which is probably why I didn’t get an itch to research when other priorities took over. So I shook things up a little, just to make things more interesting.

I’ve been researching my Adams family line for the last 16 months. Desperate to get away from deed transcribing, I poked around on Ancestry and took a look at the small family tree of my first cousin (my father’s sister’s daughter). She had the parents of our great grandmother listed (though not sourced). I took that clue and ran with it. I found conflicting evidence and I have not yet resolved who my second great grandparents are, but I’m all energized by the possibilities. I enjoyed the digging and the problem solving.

I think that I will shift my genealogy focus from my father’s paternal Adams line to his maternal line, the Rascos, at the end of the quarter (or perhaps before). I’m feeling the need to explore some fresh names.

I loved being focused on the Adamses for so long because I was able to remember who was who and it kept clarity in my research. But after more than a year with them, I’m taking the blinders off and shifting to the Rascos. I’ll stay focused, just on something else. That feels good and exciting to me.

How about you? Do you focus on a specific family group or line in a single session, month or quarter? Or do you like to mix it up?

Identifying your military ancestors

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Before Memorial Day in 2016, I wrote this post on figuring out which ancestors might have fought in which war. I ran it again on Memorial Day weekend last year and I’ve decided to make it an annual post. Incidentally, Fold3.com is offering free access to their military records through tomorrow night (Saturday, May 26, 2018).

Whenever I read about a records collection for a certain conflict (which seems to happen around military-related holidays, like Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day or anniversaries of conflicts) I get excited about researching my ancestors in those collections, which can be such a treasure trove of information. But in the past sometimes I would have difficulty remembering which ancestor might have fought in which war and I’d become overwhelmed and abandon the effort.

So I created a document that shows me the prospective ancestors for each conflict, based on the dates they were born. At the time, I used a table from Family Tree Magazine but when I went looking for it to share in this post, I couldn’t find it. However, I did find an even-better table called Ages of Servicemen in Wars that lists 20 military conflicts, the years they were fought, the typical birth dates for soldiers and the  typical ages of soldiers. Thank you, FamilySearch!

Armed with that information, I created a simple spreadsheet (pictured, in part, above) with the following column headers:

  • Conflict
  • Likely Birth Year of Soldiers
  • Prospective Ancestor
  • Confirmed Ancestor

For each conflict, I entered the names of the ancestors who were born during the birth-year window listed in column 2. After I ascertained that one had indeed fought in that war, I entered an X in the Confirmed Ancestor column. What I should have done and will from here forward, is place a dash or an N in the Confirmed Ancestor column to indicate that I’d ruled that ancestor out.

This is a simple way to see at a glance who I might research when I’m looking at military collections at the National Archives, Fold3 or elsewhere. It’s easy to create and I think it’s well worth the time spent.