Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Excited to use Reunion 10

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I use Reunion software on my Mac and today upgraded to version 10. I usually am pretty cautious about updating software that I’m happy with, but one look at the video outlining the new features and I was in. (And that was before I learned I could get the upgrade at no cost, since I’d bought Reunion 9 in 2012.)

I’d had no complaints with Reunion 9. When I started doing genealogy research 10 years ago, I hand wrote everything. But when I got serious about it again this year, I knew I needed software and I decided on Reunion, which is native for the Mac. So I had nothing to compare it to, but I was very pleased.

But Reunion 10 is even more exciting. They’ve added many easy-to-use reporting and charting features. They’ve also expanded what you can see on one screen and increased the ease of navigation.

As I’ve mentioned in a post about my research plan, my strategy is to use Reunion to document my family history research and to add nothing to it that has not been verified and properly sourced. At first that felt like kind of a drag…Reunion felt like a necessary evil. As I add data to it and watch my family tree grown, fully confident that the information contained in it is solid, Reunion is feeling more like a friend. And now that I have Reunion 10 to play with, it’s become an even more interesting friend. (Like going home from college with a friend and discovering she has a cute brother!)

Click below to see the video that outlines the improvements to Reunion 10. If you haven’t already updated, you might consider it!

The Top Ten New Features in Reunion 10 (video)

Free family fan chart

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Family tree fan template
I love a family fan chart. With the software program I use on my Mac, Reunion, I can easily create one. (I love technology.) I think it’s a wonderful, pretty, easy-to-read way to see where I am in my family history research.

Martha Stewart, queen of crafts, offers a free family fan chart template for those who might like to make one on their own.(Me, I’ll let the computer do it.) If that sounds like fun to you, go on over to Martha’s website to download it!

Fun with old newspapers

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I was researching my great great grandparents (my maternal grandmother’s grandparents) this weekend and was on a quest for their death certificates. Alas, I have not found the death certificates yet (they died in Colorado, which doesn’t seem to want to share copies of death certificates with people as distantly related as I am). But I did do a search on the Pueblo, Colorado, library systemand located a citation for my great great grandmother’s obituary, which was published in the Pueblo Chieftain on November 5, 1945. I haven’t been able to put my hands on that obituary yet.

Newspaper article from Kit Carson County Record

From the Kit Carson County Record, August 15, 1912

The search for the obituary put me on a quest for copies of any newspaper articles about them and I found the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. It provides  images of Colorado newspaper articles from 1859 to 1923. That’s too early to find my great great grandparents’ obituaries, but I did find a few mentions of my people, including one that was kind of valuable.

I had seen on unverified family trees that my grandmother’s grandmother’s maiden name was McAdams (she was married to J. B.  Ruberson), but I had yet to verify that. But I found this fun little article about a visit from her nieces, whose last names are both McAdams, visiting her. (Ah, small town life.) To me, that provides some confirmation of the assertion that her maiden name was McAdams.

I’ve found several other places to read old newspapers (and I’m sure there are more). One is Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, from the Library of Congress. Another is Genealogy Bank, a paid service. And there’s NewspaperARCHIVE.com, another paid service. Don’t overlook the power of Google (which is how I found the Colorado Historic Newspapers, I think). And it’s also worth looking at the online public library systems in the area the newspaper was published in.

One of the things I love about family history research is the peek it provides into history. And looking at old newspapers is another great window into another time.

What should I work on today?

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I try to work on family history research at least once a week. (Writing a post on this blog twice a week has helped motivate me!)  I appreciate that I have the time to work on it that frequently, but I’ve discovered that sometimes it seems not quite frequent enough to keep my momentum going. By the time another week rolls around, I can’t quite remember where I left off and I don’t know what I should work on.

I know from my experience as a professional organizer that not knowing where to start can be paralyzing. I see this in my clients who are dealing with a lot of clutter: they can’t figure out where to start, so they don’t start at all.

This happened to me last Saturday. When I sat down to work on genealogy research, I couldn’t think of where to start. Of course, the truth is that I can start literally anywhere on my family tree. There’s always something to work on. I’m working my way up my tree and sometimes when I make a link to a new generation, I’ll skip ahead to work on finding information about those folks, even when there’s still plenty of information to seek on a generation closer to me in time.

So I could play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey when it comes to my family tree and pick any relative and start looking for more information on them. But I’m not keen on such a random approach (though that might be fun to try some day).

As it turned out, last weekend, I remembered that I’d found military information on an ancestor in a family history I’d downloaded, which led to some fun exploration.

At one point, when I first got back into this research, I kept a hand written research journal, which I filled out at the end of each research session and one of the items I would enter is next steps. Somehow, that has fallen by the wayside, but it would be a good habit to get back into.

Here are some ways I can think of to make sure that I don’t get paralyzed or delayed by the “what should I work on” question:

  • Keep a running list of questions to research. When I come across something I want to look into further (but don’t have time to research at that moment), I can add it to the list
  • Keep a “next steps” journal that I add to at the end of each research session
  • Start an electronic checklist for each ancestor of items to research, so I can tell at a glance what information is still up for grabs
  • Pick an ancestor at random and start exploring
  • On the other end of the spectrum, I could set up a very systematic approach and work through a single surname before I move to another

My personality is such that a systematic approach would feel constricting. I think keeping a list of things to work on and selecting the puzzle that jumps out at me that day is probably what’s going to work for me.

The key here, I think, is to know that there’s no wrong answer to the question, “What should I work on now?” That’s the beauty of this research. As long as I’m documenting what I find so that I don’t end up spending loads of times on false leads, any research I do is productive.