Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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.

An impromptu 30 x 30 challenge (March 2020 edition)

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It’s March 1 and I’m sitting at the airport in Salt Lake City, watching the snow fall and waiting to go home to St. Louis, where it should be 65 degrees. I took out a piece of paper and started mind mapping some notes and reflections. It hit me that what I really need is a 30 x 30 challenge. February was a blur for me and while I spent time thinking about genealogy because I was putting the final touches on my RootsTech presentation (which went well!), I barely did any family history research of my own. (I did manage to squeeze in a little time at the Family History Library.)

So I’m creating a 30 x 30 challenge this month, where I commit to doing 30 minutes of research every day. Or at least I’ll strive for daily research that totals 900 minutes by the end of the month.  Does anyone want to join me?

I find making this commitment to be really motivating. I’m an Upholder, for those of you who are familiar with Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies. The 30 x 30 challenge elevates my genealogy research to the top of my priority list. Since I am not traveling again until April 1, this seems like a great month to do it.

Please let me know in the comments if you’d like to take part of the challenge. Feel free to say what you’ll be working on (though don’t feel like you have to).

RootsTech was great, by the way. This coming week, I’ll write a post-RootsTech post.

30 x 30 challenge wrap up

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It’s January 30, the last day of this month’s 30 x 30 challenge. I’m curious: How did it go? Did you find that the challenge being in January helped a little? I think it helped me because I wanted to start the year off right.

Were you able to meet your goal? Even if you weren’t, did the challenge help you do more than you would have done without the challenge?

I had a great first 3/4 of the month. As I mentioned in the mid-month check in, I manged to research every day the first half of the month, even if I wasn’t able to put in a full 30 minutes. But I hit a snag with a trip I took on January 22. I was gone for five days and I was able to research only two of them. And then once I got home, I had to deal with a family health crisis (my brother in Walla Walla is very ill) which necessitated a last-minute trip there, so genealogy is completely off my radar.

But I feel very good about the work I was able to do and once life returns to normal I hope to hop back in. I’ll be going to Salt Lake City at the end of February for RootsTech and I hope to spend some time at the Family History Library, so that will be a big boost!

Please let me know in the comments how your challenge went!

Time for January 30 x 30 check in!

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It’s almost the middle of our January 30 x 30 challenge. For those of you who signed up, how is it going? Are you managing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or organizing or scanning or whatever it is you set out to do)?

My challenge was made a little extra challenging by travel. I was in Walla Walla, Washington, visiting my dad from January 3 to 12.  I’m happy to say that I did manage to research every day, but one of those days barely counts. The day I traveled home (a 12-hour journey by car and plane) I thought I’d get research done on the plane, but when I started working I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. So the ten minutes I put in was barely productive. I give myself credit for at least trying, but execution was not impressive.

One thing that’s helped me get back on track is that yesterday, back at my desk, I decided to pull out my 2nd great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, which I’d received way back in 2015. At the NGS conference that year, I heard Julie Miller talk about these files: what they contain and how to process them. I immediately requested the complete pension files for my three Union veteran ancestors from the National Archives. I’ve already processed the other two but had not focused on the file of Benjamin Franklin Igleheart. Since I’ve turned my attention to the Igleheart line, this is a natural thing for me to work on.

Once I pulled it out of the file (I haven’t yet scanned it), I saw that I’d started by putting the pages in chronological order and created a source citation for the whole pension file. The next step is to create a source citation for each individual document, print the citation on a label and affix the label to the paper document before scanning the whole document. After it’s scanned, I’ll start transcribing it. Yesterday I spent 45 minutes creating the citations and their labels and got through about eleven documents before having to move on to something else. For the near future, this will be the project I’ll be working every day.

I’d forgotten how great it was to have a project like this that I can break down into tiny bites. I love knowing exactly what I’m going to be working on and I love that there are lots of little milestones in this giant project so I can celebrate my progress.

Enough about me. I hope your challenge is going well and I look forward to hearing about it in the comments!