Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

My simple 2021 genealogy goal

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I’m a big goal setter. I set goals for my business, some of which I actually achieve. I set goals for my personal life, too. (Creating a daily yoga habit is one I’ve actually achieved, and I’m working hard on drinking 64 oz of water a day.)

Every year, I set genealogy goals too. And I rarely achieve them. Last year I blogged about my tendency to set up complex goals and I detailed what I thought were achievable goals for 2020. But once again, I didn’t look the goals I’d set. (Despite that, I did pretty well with the ones that involved creating good habits.)

So this year I want to keep it very simple. My word of the year for 2021 is ease and I want that to saturate every aspect of my life. I really would like to do genealogy every day. (And for that reason I’ll probably have six 30 x 30 challenges this year.) In the interest of ease, I’m going to set up a single genealogy goal for the year, one that I can turn to whenever I’m in doubt about what to work on and one on which I can make progress just a few minutes at a time.

My genealogy goal for 2021 is to review all my source citations and source documents. Back in 2016, I exported my sources and created a checklist in Evernote. (I blogged about that here.) In 2018, I added to the list, which now has 834 sources in it. Of those, I’ve checked 86.

So my go-to activity in 2021 will be to make my way through the sources, checking them off as I go. I anticipate learning a lot and making a lot of notes for further follow up. Will I get through all 748 remaining sources? I don’t know. It’s possible.

I actually have 1195 sources now, having added 461 since the last time I updated the checklist. I’d like to think that perhaps those more recent sources don’t need checking since I’ve become a better genealogist. But if I get there and it feels productive, I’ll keep going.

Right now, this sounds like an interesting project. It remains to be seen whether it will stay interesting. In any case, it will be a nice starting point for the year. I like having a single goal so simple that I’ll remember it.

How about you? What are your genealogy goals for 2021?

Sneaking in a few hours at the Family History Library

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An aisle of microfilm at the Family History Library

I leave for Salt Lake City on Tuesday morning to attend RootsTech. It just hit me that I have about three hours on Tuesday afternoon before I have to be at the social event for speakers when I could visit the Family History Library. Unfortunately, it’s been such a hectic month between travel and organizing work that I haven’t been focusing on my genealogy research as much as I’d like.

The Family History Library can be so overwhelming and I know that the key to success for me will be to know what I’m looking for so I can make the most of my brief time there. I took a look at my Library Lookups notebook in my genealogy stack in Evernote and was pleased to see some physical books as well as microfilms listed there that I am able to see only when I’m at the library in Salt Lake City. (That notebook also contains notes for items at can see locally at the an FHL-affiliated library.)

So plan is to be arrive in Salt Lake, check into my hotel (if I can), eat lunch, drink plenty of water and hit the library with a whole lot of focus. I had great visits there in 2017 and 2018 and I hope to repeat my success.

As I asked in 2017, if any of you have any advice on strategies or things to bring along to the library to make it easier (I’ll have my phone and my laptop), I’m all ears!

My 2020 genealogy goals

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I have a confession to make. I’m good at setting genealogy goals at the beginning of the year but I’m very bad at paying attention to them. One of the problems is that in the past I’ve set up complicated (though measurable) goals that I’m not able to keep top of mind. I set a complicated goal chart as part of my 2015 goals and I’m pretty sure I didn’t look at it all year. Another problem I’ve encountered is that my genealogy goals were sometimes unrealistic. In the post linked above, I wrote, “I’ve learned that when I create unrealistic goals I tend to ignore them.” That is so true.

So this year, I’m keeping it simple. I’ve decided to focus on my paternal great grandmother’s line, the Iglehearts, after having spent a couple of years researching her husband’s line. It’s full of opportunity because I have a Civil War Union veteran in that line (Benjamin Franklin Igleheart, 1845-1913) whose Civil War pension file I haven’t yet transcribed or analyzed. I can also trace myself back to the Mayflower on that line, but I haven’t verified everyone in that path. I’m excited to shift gears a little and focus on some different people.

Here are the goals I set out for myself for 2020, which I wrote in Evernote on an airplane ride on January 3. They feel gentle and realistic.

  2. Transcribe Benjamin Franklin Igleheart’s Civil War pension
  3. Trace myself back to the Mayflower by Thanksgiving
  4. Eliminate the downloaded documents backlog
  5. Create habit of processing documents as I download them
  6. Keep logging each research session (including next actions)
  8. Consume purchased learning resources
  9. Watch at least one webinar a week

If I can build a daily-research habit and a habit of watching a webinar every week, this will be a huge win. I think the practices outlined above will help stay in touch with my research and give me focus if I flounder. My goal of cultivating a daily research habit probably will mean lots of 30 x 30 challenges in 2020!

I tend to select a word of the year at the beginning of each year and this year’s word is INTENTION. These genealogy goals feel full of intention and I really think my word will bring me back to them every day.

How about you? Did you create genealogy goals for 2020? If so, feel free to share them!

 

Photo by Hobbies on a Budget via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Let’s create history for our descendants this Thanksgiving

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Once again, here’s my annual Thanksgiving post, originally written three years ago. I wish all my readers a wonderful Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.)

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.