Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick tip #30: Don’t forget to have fun!

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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 couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This is one I need to remind myself about when the going gets tough.

Don’t forget to have fun

Those of us who aren’t professional genealogists are more than likely pursuing this passion for the fun of it. But sometimes it doesn’t feel like fun does it? Butting up against a brick wall can make your head hurt!

When I start to get frustrated with my research, I remind myself that I’m doing this because I enjoy it. And then I step away from the frustrating problem and do some genealogy activity that I find particularly fun. Your idea of fun will certainly be different, but you might give this a try. You might even keep a list of fun tasks that you can turn to when you to reignite your love for genealogy.

Remember, this is supposed to be fun!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

My 2022 genealogy goals

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Are you a goal setter? I sure am. Every year I set aside a day to work on my personal and business goals. This year, I did it on December 16. But I ran out of time to consider my personal genealogy goals, so I did that this morning.

I sat down with a pad of paper and I did a little brainstorming session with myself. I achieved some clarity really fast. The release of the 1950 census on April 1 creates a natural break in the year. I decided to focus the first quarter of the year on preparing for that day and cleaning up my existing research. The latter three quarters will be about new research and avoiding a backlog.

So here’s what I decided:

First quarter 2022:

Rest of 2022:

  • Glean as much information from the 1950 census as possible
  • Shift my family focus to the Jeffries line (that’s my maternal grandmother’s line)
  • Do a deep dive on my Civil War ancestor Richard Anderson Jeffries

One overarching intention for the year is to try harder to do daily research. For the last few years, I’ve found that in the absence of a 30 x 30 challenge, I ignore my research. Sometimes, I’m able to sustain daily research for months at a time, but that’s fallen by the wayside. In 2022, I’m going to try to do at least a little something every single day to keep my mind in the game. I know that, for me, that means researching in the early morning. Perhaps I’ll try to go to bed a little earlier so I can get up earlier to accomplish this. I plan a 30 x 30 challenge starting January 1, 2022, so I’ll have that support as I kick off the year.

I realize that I didn’t so much set goals this year as clarify my focus. And that’s good enough for me. It feels great. The plan for the year feels simple and attainable.

If you’ve set goals that you feel like sharing, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear them!

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

At Thanksgiving, we can create history for our descendants

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I originally wrote this post five years ago, and I like repeating it on Thanksgiving where we might once again be getting together for a meal with our loved ones. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers!

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.)

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.

Why do you do genealogy research?

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What’s your why? In our podcast Getting to Good Enough, my co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and I frequently talk about the importance of knowing why you want to do something. Taking a moment to focus on that why can help you make decisions about how you want to spend your time, money and energy.

So sometimes I think about why I do genealogy research. Why do I spent countless hours and, face it, quite a bit of money ancestor hunting? I do it for the fun of it. I absolutely love playing detective. I love getting to know my ancestors. (And I love getting to know the people I’ve met through being a genealogist.) I even love organizing my research. The whole kit and caboodle is my idea of fun.

I don’t have kids, so I’m not doing this for my descendants. I’m doing it for me. I hope that my research will outlive me, but I’m okay with it if it doesn’t. But I think that might make me atypical.

So I’m curious: Why do you do genealogy research? Please share in the comments!