I posted this on Friday and one reader to wrote to say she was getting an error message when she tried to comment. I’ve been trying to fix it and I think I have finally succeeded. I think there were two sets of problems (a new IP address and an updated plugin) and I’m hopeful you all can comment. So, please, do let me know how your 30 x 30 challenge is going! And if you try to comment and can’t, please shoot me an email at janine@organizeyourfamilyhistory.com and let me know. Thanks!
Update! I got GoDaddy involved and I think it’s really fixed this time. So if you do have a problem, please let me know.
It’s the middle of month already and time for a check in for those who are participating in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge. How’s it going? Have you been able to research daily? Are you putting in 30 minutes a day? Even if you’re not, have you found the challenge helpful?
It’s been a good, if not great, month for me. When there’s a 30 x 30 challenge my research is definitely more on my radar. I have researched every day, except one, which I feel great about. The one day I missed I had a good excuse: my husband was hospitalized for five nights at the beginning of the month with a heart ailment (he’s doing well now). One of those evenings I just plain forgot to research. But I was proud of myself for remembering the other days! (My Trello daily task management board has been outrageously helpful.)
This month I’ve been focusing on reducing my backlog and until yesterday I was doing great. I started out with 96 documents to process and I have now have 60. Before yesterday, there wasn’t a day that my backlog of documents went up–I’ve been trying hard to resist adding documents. (So far this month, I’ve processed 48 documents and added 12.) But yesterday in order to feel comfortable adding a couple of documents I’d found on last year’s research trip to my database I had to do a little more research and then downloaded four documents that I didn’t have to process.
I have averaged 24 minutes a day, but I hope to bring that average up this weekend. I plan to keep working on my backlog. I have a fighting chance of getting it down to zero, which would be amazing!
How’s it going for you? Please let us know in the comments!
I actually have been researching every day! I’ve been adding all my paternal DNA cousins (with a common ancestor) to my tree.
That’s fantastic, Shannon!
Thanks again for leading these 30×30 challenges! As a result of participating in several of them now, I’m much more consistent in doing research regularly. And at least as significant is that I’m also more consistent with capturing daily research activities in my Word-based research log.
According to my research log, I’ve actively researched just over half the days this month, but the daily average is well over 30 minutes!
That’s great, Russ! It makes me happy that these challenges are so helpful to you.
Life got in the way after about five days… I should know better than to participate in a 30×30 genealogy challenge in the month of October, even in a pandemic.
These things happen! Don’t beat yourself up. I bet I’ll do another one in January. Who knows, maybe even December!
I had a really bad bout of sinusitis so missed about a week of doing anything, however, I will be able to get back on track as I have my list of next steps (A great tip from one of your older blog posts).
Missy, I hope you’re feeling better! I’m so glad you’ve kept your next steps so that you can jump right back in!
I would love to do this as I think it would help me define what it is I need to do rather than being all over the place as I am now. My tree is on Ancestry and FamilyTreeMaker and I always seem to just look randomly at various things. When you talk about “Documents to process”, what is that about?
Hi, Nadine. Thanks for your comment! I’ll be running another challenge in January, but you can do one on your own! To answer your question, I download all the source documents I find and then I rename the file, create a source citation in my genealogy software (Reunion), then extract all the relevant facts and enter them into Reunion, using the source citation of that document. Sometimes I download a file and don’t do those steps, so a backlog starts to emerge. This time it was really bad! I describe how I process a downloaded document in this blog post: https://organizeyourfamilyhistory.com/process-downloaded-document/.