• BLOG
  • ABOUT
    • Privacy Policy
  • GENEALOGY GUIDES
    • Orderly Roots guides
      • 10 Secrets to Organizing Your Genealogy Research
      • 10 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Doing Genealogy
      • Organizing Your Genealogy Right From the Start
    • The Paperless Genealogy Guide
  • SERVICES
  • MAILING LIST
  • CONTACT

Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Free access to NGS Monthly archives for a limited time

May 5, 2020 By Janine Adams Leave a Comment

Here’s another free resource to explore during any extra time you may have during this pandemic. The National Genealogical Society is providing free access to five years of archives of the NGS Monthly, an online publication usually only available as a benefit to members. Access to the public started yesterday and will continue until July 31. The archive is housed here on the NGS website. It appears that each issue has two articles, so that means there are 120 articles now freely available. NGS encourages you to share this information with family and friends.

Issues are arranged in reverse chronological order, but there is a search bar at the top of the page that will allow you to search the archive. Individual articles are also tagged, so exploring tags of interest is another way to approach reading the archive.

NGS Monthly is currently written and edited by award-winning genealogist Aaron Goodwin and the articles are clear and easy to read. I’m a member of NGS but I have to admit that I haven’t paid close attention to the NGS Monthly. I am grateful to be reminded what a wealth of information is available there!

Filed Under: Excitement, Genealogy tips Tagged With: learning opportunities, NGS

NGS moves to virtual for its May 2020 conference

April 16, 2020 By Janine Adams 3 Comments

I feel so fortunate that the RootsTech conference was held in February, just prior to the COVID-19 crisis’s grip on the world. The National Genealogical Society wasn’t so lucky with its conference, which was to be held, like RootsTech, at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City. The NGS conference was scheduled for May 20 to 23, 2020.

Today, NGS announced that the 2020 conference will be virtual. The plan, as explained on their website, is for a full day of NGS Live! on May 20, from 11 am to 7 pm eastern. “In addition, streaming access to many more sessions will be available starting in July.” The conference organizers promise more updates as they become available.

To me, this seems like a smart approach and it’s better than canceling the conference. (RootsTech announced last month that its planned November 2020 conference in London is being postponed for a year. But that announcement came less than a month after the conference was announced, so the planning was in its early stages.) I’m sure it was a very difficult decision for the conference organizers and that it will be a logistical challenge.

I was to have attended the conference of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals in early April and that conference was canceled entirely. I’m happy for the NGS registrants that there will be some type of conference next month.

These are interesting times, aren’t they?

Filed Under: General, Reflections Tagged With: conferences, learning opportunities, NGS

Putting my imperfectionism to work

April 7, 2020 By Janine Adams 7 Comments

As I wrote in a post last week, I’ve been working on processing my 2nd great grandfather’s Civil War pension file. I got the tedious up-front source citation work completed, which involved creating source citations and labels for each of the 53 documents, affixing the labels to the paper documents and scanning the whole thing into a long pdf. I’m now working on transcribing the documents, one per day. (This is how I choose to process this type of document–I’m not saying it’s the only way or the best way, but it works for me.)

So today, I was working on Document Six and I realized that I have a typographical error in my source citation. The correct application number is 1007144 but I had typed 1006144 and copied it onto all my labels without realizing my error. That numbers appears 54 times (one for each document, plus an overall citation). Of course, it’s easy to fix in my software. But then I was faced with the pension document itself having the wrong application number on every document.

I considered my options:

  1. Fix all the labels, print them out again, affix the corrected label over the incorrect label on each document, and rescan the whole thing.
  2. Hand correct each label and rescan the whole thing.
  3. Add a notation to each label in the pdf itself
  4. Add a notation at the beginning of the pdf only

It felt like the “right’ thing to do would be option number 1. But what a pain in the butt that would be. I was okay with doing it once. But doing it a second time felt practically unbearable. Plus my printer is about to run out of toner.

I thought about what was important to me and realized that the most important citation was the one in my Reunion software (the one that I corrected in about 5 seconds). But I didn’t want my pension file pdf to be wrong, in case I pass it along to someone else.

So I added a notation in the pdf, 54 times, that says “correct application no. 1007144.” (That’s a picture of it above.) And you know what? That’s going to be good enough. It didn’t feel good enough to just do it at the top of the file. I want each citation label corrected in case someone is looking at only one document.

It took me less than 10 minutes to make this electronic correction (thanks to the miracle of copying and pasting), substantially less time than option number 1 would have taken. Bonus: I didn’t use up toner or risk the frustration of jammed documents in my scanner. Luckily, this is not a situation I will encounter with any kind of frequency, since I so rarely deal with paper documents.

I try to take these little lessons about “good enough” to heart and pass them along when I can. When does good enough speak to you in your genealogy research?

ETA: In the comments to this post, Kay asked for an example of a placement of the label. As I mentioned in the reply, I usually put it wherever it fits (or on the back of the page). Here’s a full-page view of the label placement.

Filed Under: Challenges, Reflections Tagged With: Civil War, electronic files, Igleheart, learning opportunities

Free daily webinars on Legacy Family Tree this month

April 3, 2020 By Janine Adams Leave a Comment

Ready for some genealogy learning? Legacy Family Tree Webinars has provided another great opportunity to expand our knowledge while our time at home is expanded. Every day in April, they’ll be offering a different free webinar. To access it, go to the Legacy Family Tree Webinars homepage and look for the yellow bar at the top of the screen that says Click here to watch today’s free webinar. (Every day in April – a free webinar!). Just click there and you’ll be able to watch the webinar of the day; no login required.

Each day of the week has as theme this month:

  • Sundays – Methodology
  • Mondays – DNA
  • Tuesdays – Ethnic Genealogy
  • Wednesdays – Technology
  • Thursdays – Around the Globe
  • Fridays – Beginners
  • Saturdays – TechZone

Visit this page on Legacy Family Tree to see a complete list of the free offerings and the day each is offered. Then mark your calendar!

Filed Under: Genealogy tips Tagged With: learning opportunities

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Go to page 5
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 28
  • Go to Next Page »

about me

I'm Janine Adams, a professional organizer and a genealogy enthusiast. I love doing family history research, but I find it's very easy for me to get overwhelmed and not know where to turn next. So I'm working hard to stay organized and feel in control as I grow my family tree.

In this blog, I share my discoveries and explorations, along with my organizing challenges (and solutions). I hope by sharing what I learn along the way I'll be able to help you stay focused and have fun while you do your research, too.

tags

Adams amy johnson crow anniversary Brown cemetery Civil War conferences connections dna electronic files Evernote excitement Family Curator family photos genealogy tools genetic genealogy getting started goals How They Do It Igleheart Jeffries keepsakes learning opportunities maps newspapers NGS organizing aids overwhelm paper files planning podcasts quick tips rasco record keeping research research log research trip resources RootsTech social history source documentation technology Thomas MacEntee time management vital records
Speaker Badge: Rootstech 2017

join the facebook community!

join the facebook community!

My organizing business

Learn more about my organizing business, Peace of Mind Organizing®.

Subscribe by RSS

  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Subscribe by email

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.

© 2021 Janine Adams