It’s January 15 already and it’s time to report in on our progress with the 30 x 30 challenge. Twenty people signed on for the challenge, which involves doing genealogy research (or organizing or whatever you choose to do) for 30 minutes a day every day for 30 days. I’d love to hear how it’s going! Have you been able to research every day? Have you missed some days but gone back to it? Have you given up? I’d love to know what you’ve accomplished and what benefits you’ve found to researching daily (or trying to research daily).
I’ll start! I have indeed managed to research every day. Over the weekend I even researched several hours each day (and blogged about how I lost my focus). It’s been so nice to make daily research a priority again. It makes me feel more connected with my research (and my ancestors). I haven’t made any startling breakthroughs, but I am giving Trello a whirl for keeping track of genealogy tasks and I look forward to writing a future post about how that is working out.
If you’re participating in the challenge (regardless of whether you officially said you were), please check in!
Good morning. I am loving this challenge! I have researched faithfully every day, making up for the late start since I don’t think I began until January 3rd. I have researched one direct-line ancestor each day in my Ahnentafel (ancestor table), focusing on where they are located in the U.S. censuses. I have gotten through my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. My goal is to put family groups together all the way through my great-great-grandparents and then choose a lane, or a line, to research further. I have a tendency toward what I call Magpie Syndrome, being distracted by anything “shiny” while researching and abandoning my plans to chase down a rabbit hole. Having a research log in Evernote has kept me on the straight and narrow.
I have listened to your interview on Amy Johnson Crow’s podcast (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/organizing-genealogy-files/) and also listened to her podcast about starting a blog (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/how-to-start-a-genealogy-blog/) and, lo and behold, I have started one myself! I can’t believe how easy it was to create one! I only have one post so far, but I have created an editorial calendar so that I know what I am going to post about next and can promote it at the bottom of each post. It is called Shaking My Family Tree and can be found at https://www.shakingmyfamilytree.com/. I invite you to take a peek and I welcome feedback.
I hope that everyone is having success with their challenge. Janine, thank you very much for getting this going. I plan on continuing my 30×30 and trying to make it a 30×365,barring any vacation time. I am stoked!
Wow, Christy, that is exciting! I just checked out your first post and enjoyed it. I signed up to receive notifications of new posts via email.
I’m so happy that the 30 x 30 challenge has been so successful in keeping you focused and you’ve made so much progress. I also love that your research log has been helpful!
Thanks for the inspiration and the kick in the pants I needed. I am really jazzed about getting back into my research. I look forward to hearing what everybody else is doing.
It feels good to being back to doing 30 minutes a day. I did miss two days, but I did attend a local genealogy meeting that was for 5 hours. Hopefully this evens out. I try to make Sundays a computer free day so I usually spend some time sorting through my paper files. Originally, I used my non genealogy g-mail account so I hope I did not double post this message.
The rules are your own, Jerry, but in my book your 3-hour meeting makes up for the missed days. I’m glad it’s feeling good to get back to 30 minutes a day! (I went ahead and deleted the duplicate comment.)
This challenge has been really good for me. I’ve been able to get 30 minutes or more in a day. It’s helped me get back into the groove again. The exciting part is that working on it so often got me to face some of the walls in my tree. I started reaching out to other people I saw on Ancestry looking for the same people. This caused an amazing break through. This last week I connected with a distant cousin on my husband side that had the family bible from Ireland in the early 1800’s with names, dates and pictures that no one has seen on this branch. When this Gr gr gr grandfather passed the oldest son and family got the Bible. This bit of info didn’t get passed on from generation to generation on my husband’s branch but what a great cause for celebration it has made today.
How exciting! That’s an amazing breakthrough and I’m thrilled to bits that the 30 x 30 challenge prompted you to reach out to others and have that amazing discovery. Congratulations!!
I’ll be honest. This challenge has been hard for me. Out of the first fifteen days of this month, I’ve only managed to research for eight days. Some of it was due to other things going on in my life and some of it was due to pure laziness. I’m still trying to back into the saddle of doing research every day but it’s hard because I haven’t done any genealogical research for about two weeks. I’m still trying to figure out a way to pump myself up to get back into it after so long a break that’s not waiting until it becomes the first of the month again to re-energize me. However, I haven’t given up yet!
What I have been trying to do is four- (or five-) fold, so to speak:
A) Input my (paper) files into my genealogy program (with their sources) (Long story short, I lost almost all of my research data on my genealogy program about a year ago (the information was from more than a decade ago – which was from around the time I stopped doing genealogy until recently)),
B) Mark everything that I have on each person on Thomas MacEntee’s research checklist (one for each person),
C) Input all (paper) research logs I have on everyone into Thomas MacEntee’s research log (also one for each person), and
D) Write at least two proper research reports for every person: 1. A summary (with no research question) of all the research I have conducted on that person since I started doing genealogy research 17 years ago (with a good decade break in the middle) so I know what I have on them and where I need to go and 2. Research reports on all linkages (1, 2, and/or 3) they could possibly have … or at least I have documentation on. This is for all direct ancestors starting with me and going back to my second-great-grandparents plus all of my great-grandparents’ siblings and all of the first cousins for one of my grandma’s.
The reason I’m doing all of this is partly because I need to re-input the data (It’s not going to do it by itself even though I would like it too! 🙂 ) and mostly because I have a deadline to start a subscription that I had won to a paid-genealogy site at a conference last year. I would like to make the most of said website.
I apologize in advance if this comment had more info than you cared to know and if it sounded like I was complaining. I did not mean to do the latter.
Rebecca, thanks for sharing! I found it very interesting to read what you’re doing. I urge you to be kind to yourself–you researched almost every other day. That’s great! I wonder whether part of your challenge is that the work you’ve set out for yourself, while extremely valuable, isn’t all that exciting. Could you sprinkle in some work on a research question that excites you?
Keep up the great work! I wish you the best of luck in getting it done.
I could…. It’s just that I’d preferably not do a research question because I don’t want to add on more work for an individual (or a group of individuals (ie a family)) than what I already have to do on them right now! But thanks for the encouragement anyways!
It looks you worked it well in January, based on your end-of-the-month comment. Hooray!