What a month. It feels more like 130 days since I posted about the March 30 x 30 challenge. The fact that many of us are spending so much time home probably made it easier for some of us to do 30 minutes of research for 30 days. But for others (like me) the abnormal situation has proven very distracting. I did manage to kick my genealogy in gear the last week or so of the month, focusing on webinars and on my third Civil War pension file.
I used a few of my research sessions to get the pension file ready for transcribing. It came to me from the National Archives five years ago in paper form, on legal size pages. I’ve done this twice before and outlined how I process a pension file in an earlier blog post. But basically what I did this week was put the 96-page paper file in chronological order, create a master source citation for the whole thing and separate source citations for each of the 53 documents, create and print labels for each source and then affix the labels to the appropriate paper documents before scanning the whole thing. Now I can work 30 minutes a day transcribing and adding information gleaned from the file into my genealogy software. So that feels like progress, even though I didn’t actually work 30 minutes a day.
How about you? If you participated in the challenge, were you able to keep up with your daily research? I welcome anything you’d like to share in the comments about how this most unusual month affected your research.
I hope you and yours are staying healthy.
Failed. I think I got in 20 days of personal research. I was derailed by sewing masks. So instead of hunting the dead, I made an effort to help the living stay alive. Will be on the hunt soon.
I respect your priorities!
Failed. Some of us are essential and have to work and when I get home I collapse. But this weekend I did get stated with the notebooks I filled pre digitizing and started to put things into FTM. I found some new information that I had missed as a total beginner. Also i have a lot of things that never made it into the program. Hopefully i can keep going now. Thanks for your ideas and info.
Martha, I’m impressed you got any genealogy done on top of everything else going on! That is definitely not a failure!
I’ve been trying to limit my news consumption to text items (newspapers), to reduce the emotional impact, and get to work on genealogy projects fairly early in the day. I used Reunion to find men born between 1897 and 1928 and put them into a list. Now I’m working my way through the list, finding their (US) WW2 draft cards on Ancestry. In just the last couple months, Ancestry has posted the images as well as the abstracts, and they added many jurisdictions that weren’t there three months ago, like New York City. Saving both sides of the cards and processing them into the Reunion database occupies me pretty well for several hours a day.
You might think, how many of those men could be in your database, when it’s such a recent generation? My mother was one of 12 children, and so was her mother. Not to mention Dad’s side.
Marian, thank you for the tip on WW2 draft cards being added to Ancestry! You’re smart to work on your genealogy projects early in the day and take of yourself in terms of your news consumption!
I did accumulate the time but not in 30 days. I have spent most of my time on education—webinars and reading EE rather than working on my research project. I hope another challenge will be offered soon.
Bravo! I’ll do another challenge soonish (perhaps in May?) but don’t let the absence of an official 30 x 30 challenge stop you from challenging yourself!
Having spent a lot of time trying to fix my computer I finally gave up and worked on more family interviews,going thru an old external hard drive for information and working on labeling scanned documents. Now I just have to get some of the free stuff if I can get the laptop from my husband. I hope to be able to continue doing this well even after this is all over. May everyone stay safe and good luck with what ever you can do.
Trisha, computer challenges can be so frustrating!! Congrats on the progress you were able to do. And thank you for your kind well wishes.
I made the challenge. I should have been reorganizing things in my house, but genealogy is more fun and relaxing. I have been concentrating on inputting the 1870 and 1880 census and working on some of my carryover To Do’s from 2019. Also, there is a surname page on Facebook and I have been downloading pictures from that site. I have also shared pictures on the site.
Congrats! And I encourage you to let go of that “should.” I’m a professional organizer and I have a whole list of little organizing projects I could be doing in my house! Keep up the great work!
I am excited. I made the challenge and then some in time. I am up to the L surnames in my renaming and reattaching project. Thank you for the impetus to get me going. 🙂
That’s wonderful, Linda!! Such great news.