Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

A heartfelt goodbye and thank you

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After more than a decade of writing Organize Your Family History, I’m writing today with mixed emotions to let you know that I’m retiring the blog and my Orderly Roots Guides.

When I started this journey in 2012, I had no idea how many amazing genealogists I’d meet or how much joy I would find in sharing my passion and curiosity about genealogy organizing. (And I never dreamed I’d get over a million page views!) The best part has been the community of readers. Over the years, we’ve celebrated breakthroughs, broken down brick walls, and built a supportive community together. I’ve even had a chance to meet some of you in person at genealogy conferences. And I’m deeply grateful for every comment, story, and connection.

As my own genealogy research has slowed, so has my blog posting. I believe it’s time to step back, leave the archive available for all, and close the chapter on creating new content.

Here’s what I want you to know:

  • The blog will remain online as a free resource—please continue to use and share it!
  • The Orderly Roots Guides will be available for just another week. As a thank you and a final opportunity for anyone who wants ro read them, I’m offering them at a 50 percent discount through January 4.
  • After January 4, the guides will be retired and no longer available for purchase.

As a thank you for all your support, I’m offering a special farewell sale on the Orderly Roots Guides—available now through January 4. This is your last chance to get them before they’re retired. Click here to learn more about the individual guides and the bundle. Use the coupon code GOODBYE to get 50% off the contents of your cart.

Thank you for making this journey so rewarding. Your support, enthusiasm, and stories have meant the world to me. If you’d like to share how the blog or guides have helped you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Talk to your older relatives and create history for your descendants

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This Thursday is Thanksgiving for those of us who live in the U.S. I originally wrote this Thanksgiving post in 2016, and I like repeating it every year. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! I am grateful for you!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions about their lives and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.) Or we can do what Stacy Julian does and ask our relatives to fill out a simple form.

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

My thank you to you: 25% off Orderly Roots Bundle

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Today is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. I always like to reflect on the things I’m grateful for on Thanksgiving. This year the list is especially long. And one of the items on that list is you, my Organize Your Family History community. I’ve been writing this blog for a dozen years and I am so grateful for its wonderful readers.

As an expression of gratitude, I’m offering 25% off my Orderly Roots Bundle. It’s normally $39.99 but if you use the promo code THANKS, you’ll get $10 off until Sunday, December 1, 2024 at midnight central time.

If you subscribe to my mailing list, you should have received an email yesterday with this offer. (But you don’t have to be on the mailing list to use the coupon code!)

Thank you for reading, commenting, and supporting Organize Your Family History! I hope you have a wonderful time with your family history research this weekend!

Thanksgiving is a great time to create history for our descendants

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For those of us in the U.S.,  it’s Thanksgiving week. I originally wrote this Thanksgiving post in 2016, and I like repeating it every year. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! I am grateful for you!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.) Or we can do what Stacy Julian does and ask our relatives to fill out a simple form.

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.