Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Seeking suggestions for How They Do It interviewees

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In January this year, I started my How They Do It series on the first Tuesday of the month. In that series, I publish the answers to a set of questions I’ve sent to a genealogy luminary about how they organize their genealogy research. I’ve really enjoyed doing it and, judging from the comments, readers are enjoying it too.

I’ve run out of my backlog of interviews and am looking for suggestions from you about who you might like to see interviewed. What do you say? Is there anyone you’re curious about? Please let me know in the comments.

As a reminder, these are the folks who have already participated. (I’m so grateful to them!):

  • January: Thomas MacEntee
  • February: Denise Levenick
  • March: Michael Lacopo
  • April: Diahan Southard
  • May: Pat Richley-Erickson (DearMYRTLE)
  • June: D. Joshua Taylor
  • July: Amy Johnson Crow

You can easily access these interviews by clicking on the How They Do It tag. If you haven’t read them already, I encourage you to check them out.

If you have a suggestion for who I might invite to participate, I’d be most grateful!

Anybody going to the Missouri State Genealogical Society conference?

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I’m excited about attending the Missouri State Genealogical Society’s conference in Columbia, Missouri, on August 4 and 5, which is suddenly just around the corner! Last month, when I registered, I blogged about why I love genealogy conferences so much. I find there’s always so much to learn, even when they’re in states my ancestors never lived in. This one, though, is pertinent to my research, since my Brown relatives lived in Missouri. (My mother was born in Jefferson City.) The theme of this year’s conference is “Show Me the Way Around the Brick Wall” and it features keynotes by Kathleen Brandt, international professional genealogist and consultant.

One of the many things I love about attending genealogy conferences is meeting readers of this blog. So I always post here before the conference, hoping to find folks to meet up with. So if you’re planning to attend this conference please let me know in the comments. I’ll email you and we can make plans to meet!

Staying connected with my ancestors

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In June, I completed the 30 x 30 challenge in which I did at least 30 minutes of genealogy research a day the whole month. Then I kept it up into July, managing to research each day through July 9. I’d created a wonderful routine of doing genealogy research first thing in the morning. It was a great way to start the day.

Then my routine was disrupted by a pre-planned trip to visit my dad in Walla Walla, Washington. Unfortunately, he ended up being hospitalized after a fall the day I arrived. So my days have been spent first at the hospital, then the rehab facility. He comes home in a couple of days and I go back to my home in six days. So I just haven’t had the luxury of time alone to do research. (This also explains why I didn’t blog last week!)

I was really struck yesterday by how much I miss researching. I miss my connection with my ancestors. And I miss making progress. I also miss my peaceful morning routine.

I’m trying to stay connected with my ancestors by talking with my dad and my aunt (his sister) about family history. I’ve been able to share some information that they didn’t know, uncovered in my research. And my aunt gave me the beautiful photo above of her mother as a baby, with her sister and parents. (The parents are William Reese Rasco, 1878-1957 and Louella Watts Rasco, 1879-1953. The kids are my great aunt Lessie Rasco, 1901-1994, and my grandmother, Beatrix Rasco Adams, 1907-1987.)

I hope having researched daily for 39 days will help me get right back into the swing of things when I get home next week. Perhaps I can get started before that, once once my dad is in his home and I’m hanging out with him there.

What I want to avoid is losing my mojo and getting out of the habit of researching. So you may see another 30 x 30 challenge coming up sooner rather than later!

Trying not to let a backlog build up

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One of the things I love about handling digital, rather than paper, documents is I never have to deal with a big pile of papers waiting to be filed. Over the long Independence Day weekend, I did a whole lot of genealogy research. I was researching the ten (!) children of my great great grandfather, George Washington Adams, and hitting lots of pay dirt. They were born in the late 19th century and died in the mid- to late 20th century so there were lots easily accessible documents available to me.

The problem with lots of easily accessible documents is that it can seem tedious to process them. Suddenly a census document with five kids feels like a drag rather than a treasure. That’s probably the time to take a break from the research session. Instead of taking a break and coming back fresh, what I did this weekend was save these documents to the top of my Surnames folder (as a parking lot) so I could process them later. Then I would move on to the next discovery.

On July 3 I realized my backlog was getting ridiculous and on July 4, when I found 25 documents about one particular family (who kept doing newsworthy things like filing and re-filing for divorces and marriages license), I actually processed each one before moving on to the next. (If you’re wondering what I mean by process, here’s where I describe my digital workflow.) That family lived in Indiana where death certificates are readily available and easily findable.

By weekend’s end, I had a backlog of 25 to 30 documents that I needed to deal with. I’m still researching 30 minutes a day, so I determined that those 30 minutes would be spend chipping away at the backlog, processing each document as I came to it (gleaning every bit of information and adding it to Reunion), until the backlog is gone. Today was my third day of working on the backlog and I made it through four documents before my timer went off.

I have only nine documents to go, thankfully. I want to try hard to avoid creating a backlog again. The problem, of course, is that if I’m keeping my focus on an individual and Ancestry puts one his relatives in front of me, it’s hard to ignore the relative. But that’s where my research log comes in. I can write down the new person I’ve come to, complete with a link to the document I found, and then include that person in the next steps I jot down at the end of each session. Or, if I have plenty of time, I can go ahead and process the document(s) for the new person, but make a note to come back to the original person when I’m finished. My goal is to not have unprocessed documents on my hard drive, if I can avoid it.

One of the challenges of genealogy research is balancing the thrill of discovery with the mundane tasks of processing the discoveries. As a professional organizer, I rather enjoy processing documents, but doing nothing but processing them gets tedious. By processing every document as I come to it rather than putting it off, I avoid whole sessions where all I do is process. For me, that’s a great way to have a balanced genealogy session.

Edited to add: I wrote this post on Friday morning, and on Friday afternoon I took a four-hour non-stop flight to Portland, Oregon. I spent the bulk of the time processing my backlog (which was a very enjoyable way to pass the time) and by the time we landed, it was gone, with the exception of two documents I needed to go online to suss out a little more. By Saturday morning, the backlog had vanished. Hooray!