Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

30 x 30 wrap up

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It’s the last day of the month. Somehow, during this pandemic, one month feels like two months. So this 30 x 30 challenge feels especially long. I’m proud to say that I did actually do genealogy research every day this month except one. I can’t remember what happened the day I didn’t manage to do any–I think it was a day I worked with an organizing client. But I feel very proud to have accomplished 29 out of 30 days of research. I didn’t do 30 minutes every day, but definitely averaged at least 30 minutes a day.

The challenge put genealogy research at the top of my priority list and for that I’m grateful. I’m so grateful, in fact, that I’ll probably have another one in just a couple of months. Keep your eye out for an August 2020 30 x 30 challenge. (I’m curious to see if I keep it up in July without the challenge.)

Until then, though, please let me know in the comments how the challenge went for you, if you participated. Did you manage to research every day? Did you work on what you expected? And did you find more frequent research to be more beneficial?

I can’t wait to hear. I’m grateful for those of you who took up the challenge!

June 30 x 30 mid-month check in

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We have an especially large group of folks who said they were participating in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge. (There are 40 of you!) It’s the middle of the month. I’d love to hear how it’s going!

For me, it’s been a great 30 x 30. Because of the challenge, I’ve elevated family history research to the top of my daily task list. And because I have new Trello task-management system that puts my daily tasks in front of me, I’ve researched each and every day this month. I forgot about it one day, on a Sunday that I didn’t spent time at my computer. But I did remember in time to put in a little research, though not 30 minutes. I wanted to be able to say that I haven’t missed a day. Most days I researched more than 30 minutes, because I have so much more free time.

Early in the month, I found an obituary on newspapers.com that required a premium subscription. So I signed up for a seven-day free trial and spent those seven days finding and downloading articles on various family members. (I then canceled the premium subscription.) I’ve spent the time since them processing all those downloaded articles (creating source citations, gleaning facts and entering them into Reunion and filing the articles). So I’ve had plenty of enjoyable stuff to keep me busy.

How about you? If you signed up for the challenge (or even if you didn’t), please feel free to let us know in the comments how your research month is going.

New 30 x 30 challenge starts June 1!

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One thing I’ve learned from all the time I’ve spent at home during this pandemic is that it isn’t a lack of time that prevents me from doing regular genealogy research. Apparently it’s a lack of accountability. So I’m declaring a new 30 x 30 challenge for June.

Will join me in committing to 30 minutes of genealogy research for 30 days in a row? Of course you can modify the challenge any way you want. But I’m looking to get into a groove of daily research, which was woefully lacking this month. I’m actually going back to working with organizing clients on June 1, but I won’t be so busy that I can’t insert 30 minutes of research into my daily routine.

If you’re in, please let me know in the comments. Here’s to a great research month!

It’s the end of the month! How’d your 30 x 30 challenge go?

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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.

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When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.