Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

June 30 x 30 wrap-up

By 2 Comments

Now that the June 30 x 30 challenge is in the rear view mirror, it’s time to report in. How did it go? Were you able to research or organize every day this month? And did you get in 15 hours?

I’ve definitely had better months. I saw the handwriting on the wall mid-month and relaxed my goal to a total of four hours for the last two weeks. I did manage to achieve that, I believe. I tried hard to do a little something every day, and I probably did some research ten out of the last 14 days. I did have a couple of long sessions, so I got in those four hours.

My current project is processing the documents I found in my father’s and aunt’s homes. I did the initial sort when the boxes arrived, so all I have to do now is go to the file containing the ten items I’d selected to act on and pick one or more to enter into my Reunion database. I think I’ve emptied and refilled the action file three times now, so I’ve plowed through at least 30 documents.

Having the challenge definitely helped me get more done than I otherwise would have in a crazy busy month. I’m glad I did it! I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to devote more time to research during the next 30 x 30 challenge, which will be in August or September. And I do plan to try to get some research done in July as well.

If you participated in this challenge (or even if you didn’t), please let us know in the comments how your research month was!

10 years of Organize Your Family History

By 6 Comments

Ten years ago today I published the first post on this blog. That post was titled, My quest to learn more about my family history. In it, I wrote that this blog was going to be about “figuring out what to do, how to do it, how to organize it. I’ll also be sharing the discoveries, the mistakes and the joys that come along the way.” It’s fun to look back on that statement and realize I’ve stayed true to my mission!

I started the blog as a way to help myself get and stay focused on my research. Back in the day, I loved genealogy but was frequently overwhelmed by all the research possibilities. Looking at genealogy through the eyes of a blogger has been very helpful. And writing about organizing genealogy research has helped me in organizing my own research. It’s been a really wonderful marriage of my two big passions, organizing and genealogy.

I’m very proud of this milestone. I love the blog and all the people it’s allowed me to get to know. Writing this blog has helped me learn (and teach) so much.

Here are a few stats about the blog. Over these ten years I’ve:

  • posted 753 posts, including this one:
  • had a total of 933,452 pageviews (closing in on a million!)
  • received more than 6,000 comments (counting my responses)

My most-read post is Reading hard-to-read gravestones which has been viewed a whopping 54,972 times since I posted it on July 1, 2014.

To mark the anniversary, I’m offering a special discount on Orderly Roots Bundle. Use the promo code HAPPYBIRTHDAY at checkout to get $10 off the $39.99 bundle of four guides (which includes my newest guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow) now through Saturday, June 18.

Thank you for being a valued reader of this blog!

Photo by Morgan Lane on Unsplash

 

Who Do You Think You Are? returns to NBC this summer

By 7 Comments

I was very excited to learn that NBC is bringing back the docuseries Who Do You Think You Are. According to this article in the Hollywood Reporter, it will make its premiere on July 10. The subjects for the upcoming season season are Allison Janney, Zachary Levi, Nick Offerman, Billy Porter, Zachary Quinto and Bradley Whitford.

Co-produced by Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky, the show aired on NBC from 2010 to 2012 before moving to the cable network TLC, where it aired from 2013 until 2018. I don’t have cable, so I wasn’t really able watch it on TLC. I’m delighted that it’s back and easy to find on NBC.

One thing I like about WDYTYA is that the celebrity subjects whose family histories are traced are more involved in the research process (as compared with, say, Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.) I feel that approach makes doing genealogy on your own feel more possible. The very first episode I watched, in 2011, featured Ashley Judd. It was a thrill for me because she and I shared a Mayflower ancestor, William Brewster (at least I’d been told I was descended from him–I still need to verify that). I was just starting with genealogy back then and that episode opened my eyes to the fun possibilities of genealogy research.

I look forward to the return and I hope it sparks passion and curiosity in other beginner genealogists as it did in me!

The bright side of the backlog

By 2 Comments

I often post here about having a backlog of documents that I need to deal with. When I get on a roll, I tend to download documents willy nilly, rather than pausing to process each one before downloading another. I do always rename the file as soon as I download it and put it in my Surnames folder. That list of unprocessed documents used to stress me out or at the very least make me feel like a bad genealogist.

Before I focused on my backlog during the January 30 x 30 challenge, I had 88 documents to process! (By process, I mean extracting facts from the document, entering them into my database on Reunion and creating a source citation that is used for each fact.)

By the end of the January 30 x 30 challenge (well, actually by the first week in February), my backlog was gone. And since then I’ve been focusing on watching RootsTech classes and prepping for the 1950 census release, so I haven’t been adding to the backlog since then.

It felt great to clear out the backlog. But I realized something that surprised me: I kind of miss my backlog. What? Here’s the bright side to having a letting documents pile up. When I have a backlog, I always have a mini-genealogy project at the ready. I just pick a document and process it. (I actually enjoying processing documents, so it’s not a hardship.) I don’t have to figure out what/who I want to research in a given session.

Now that I have no backlog, I have to get focused on some research questions. Weirdly, I feel a little like I’m starting from scratch.

So here’s what I decided today: I’m going to allow myself to build a backlog of up to ten documents without feeling guilty about it. But when I hit ten, I will stop looking for more and start processing what I have. I’m calling it the Rule of Ten. I imagine there will be times when I have more than ten in a given session. But I will whittle it down to below ten in the next one.

This feels really good to me and I can’t wait to see if it works out well!