Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Shifting my focus

By 17 Comments

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?

Health reports from raw DNA

By 2 Comments

My friend, Shannon Wilkinson, passed along to me an email from Promethease, a company that generate health reports based on your autosomal DNA results. For the next couple of days you can create a free account and receive a free, downloadable report. If you’ve already done a DNA test, as I have, you can upload the raw data and find what your genes tell you about your health risks, good and bad. This offer expires Thursday, May 10, 2018. (Here’s a review of Promethease from last October on the blog DNAeXplained.)

I appreciate Shannon telling me about it, but I’m going to ponder it for a day before submitting. In order to even enter the site, you have to agree to some legal terms and the last one is, I accept the risk of learning that I may be at high risk for a debilitating disease. That gave me pause. I’m not sure I want to know that I’m at a high risk for a debilitating disease. My rational mind says that knowledge is power and if I know that I’m at risk perhaps I can do something to reduce the risk. My emotional side thinks it’s easier not to know.

Last year, I did submit my DNA to VitaGene, which provides health information with an eye toward taking appropriate nutritional supplements. I had no problem with that and found the results of passing interest.

So I’ll ponder for a day, but I suspect I’ll take advantage of this free offer. What about you? Have you received health information from your DNA data and are you glad you did?

 

Overwhelm rears its ugly head

By 11 Comments

In the past, I was easily overwhelmed by my genealogy research. As my tree grew, so did my opportunities for research. I would sit down to research with no idea what to work on. A few years ago, I implemented a quarterly plan, where I would focus on one line per quarter, which helped narrow things down. That helped somewhat.

My focus got better when I implemented a few practices:

  • I decided to focus on one line (my Adams line) all year. That was last year, and this year, I’ve been sticking with the Adams family.
  • I started keeping an informal research log. At the end of each session, I write down next steps.
  • I consistently research every day, even if it’s as little as 15 minutes. That keeps my head in the game and means I don’t have to refamiliarize myself with my research at the beginning of the session.

Things were going along very well for the last six to nine months. Then I went to RootsTech.

The double-edged sword of being focused is that you get a lot done, but you have blinders on about other avenues or opportunities for research. RootsTech stripped off those blinders and I took lots of notes about possible things to research. I also came back from the conference with a busy client schedule and not as much time for research.

The result? I feel like I’m floundering a bit. I’m still researching daily. I’m still writing down next steps, but I’m a bit all over the place.

So today, I’m resolving to regain focus. My intention is to do that by choosing a project I can complete in a reasonable amount of time, one that has a clear start and finish. I have a bunch of unprocessed documents in my Surnames folder. As part of my digital workflow, I’m supposed to process all documents as I download them, but when I was at the Family History Library right before RootsTech I wasn’t able to do that. I’m going to focus on extracting data from those documents and filing them properly. In the case of the handwritten deeds I downloaded, I’ll also transcribe them.

I’m already feeling better because I have a focus, I know what I’ll be working on and I’ll be doing so systematically until I finish. When I come across other leads, I’ll write them down in my follow up folders in Evernote. (I keep follow up folders by surname in my Genealogy stack.) I’m hopeful that by the time I finish with this project I’ll have my mojo back and be able to stave off those feelings of overwhelm!

Keep your eyes out for a new 30 x 30 challenge in April. I’m going to need one!

Unmodified photo by Chris Duglosz via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

My RootsTech in pictures

By 6 Comments

I had a great time at RootsTech and returned home to a lot of catching up to do (as well as client appointments for my organizing business), so I thought today I’d share some photos of my RootsTech experience, rather than writing a long post. I promise at least one substantive blog post on the content of some of the sessions I attended.

Being at a conference with tens of thousands of other people isn’t exactly my cup of tea. But the educational offerings make it worth it for me.

I created a collage of some representative photos. Explanations will appear below the collage.

 

Here are some of the highlights:

The good

My dear friend, Shannon Wilkinson, who has been getting into genealogy research over the last couple of years, joined me at RootsTech, which made the whole event even more fun for me. We shared a lovely room at The Peery Hotel, two blocks from the convention center. It was a fraction of the price of the conference hotels! Before the first general session, the awesome emcee, Jason Hewlett, asked us all to snap a selfie with the person next to us and make a funny face, then post it on social media. The top center photo is the selfie Shannon and I made. It’s one of many photos of the two of laughing that we’ve taken over the years.

A genius at Family Search created an app that allowed attendees to see how many cousins they had who were also attending RootsTech, based on the Family Search family tree. With one simple login and a touch of the button, I was able to see that I had 300 cousins (the closest being a sixth cousin) in attendance! The photo on the bottom left shows the stats on that project conference-wide.

All the keynotes were fantastic. On Thursday we heard Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York who had an inspirational message about listening to others and about following your dreams. Shannon snapped the great picture on the  middle left. The large photo he’s standing in front of is the first photo he took of strangers. On Friday, we heard the inspirational words of former Olympic figure skater Scott Hamilton. His positivity is absolutely contagious. (No photo because the person sitting in front of me had big hair.)

On Saturday, we heard Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University and the TV show Finding Your Roots, who did not disappoint. (That’s him in the center right of the collage.) His eloquence and enthusiasm for genealogy, DNA, and teaching young people about DNA and genealogy (in his Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings program) was motivating and inspiring. Also on Saturday, we also had the opportunity to hear the beautiful Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade perform. It was a special treat to hear her perform the Oscar-winning song, “Remember Me,” (from the movie Coco) for the first time in front of a live audience. The next night she performed it (albeit in a different way) on the Oscar broadcast! Note: All the keynote talks, as well as some major sessions, were recorded and are available to watch at this link.

I am so happy I was able to take advantage of the conference being in Salt Lake City to spend a few hours looking at microfilm at the Family History Library. The bottom center photo in the collage is just one of the many aisles of microfilm storage. Amazing!

The bad

The aforementioned crowds definitely took the luster off the event for me. I snapped the photo on the top left from above as people streamed toward lunch after a session. This year, our name tags were scanned before we could enter a session. That led to long, tedious lines and difficulties passing through hallways. I hope they reconsider that. Many people had difficulty getting into talks–they stood in line for more than an hour in some cases, only to be turned away. I didn’t experience that, but I wasn’t trying to attend the popular DNA sessions. I also had no problems registering (I literally had a wait of about 30 seconds) while others waited in line up to three hours.

The ugly?

On my way out of a restaurant the day I was leaving, I encountered this gentleman who explained me that he was part of an Urban Chariot Race team called Disney Princesses. I asked him if I could take a picture of him (I couldn’t resist!) and he struck a pose. There he is on the bottom right of the collage.

Seriously, if you have a chance to attend RootsTech next year and you’re not completely opposed to crowds, I heartily recommend it!