Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

My dream genealogy staycation

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I’ve been very busy helping clients get organized recently and just have not taken the time to do genealogy research. I’ve been out all day most days and when I come home it’s all I can do to wrangle my email and get ready for the next day before collapsing with a glass of wine. (Well, it’s not quite that dramatic, but you get the idea.)

I find myself fantasizing about taking an entire week off to spend on doing genealogy research. In this dream stay-cation, I’d probably do the following:

That sounds like more than a week’s worth of activities, actually. But the truth is that the chances I would actually take a week away from clients and running my organizing business is pretty remote.

But you know what? I don’t need a week off to dig into this stuff. Heck, I don’t need an afternoon off. If I can capture an hour here or there, I’ll make progress.  And if I managed to put in 30 minutes most days, I’d make huge progress. It’s just like I tell my clients about decluttering: 15 or 30 minutes a day can make all the difference in the world. In fact, I got out my calculator and figured it out. If you declutter (or do family history research) for 3o minutes a day, five days a week, for a year , it comes to 130 hours. That’s more than three work weeks!

I still love the idea of focusing my efforts for an entire week. But for now, I’ll try to wedge about a half hour a day in and see what progress I can make!

Tracking progress

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My memory is not what it used to be. And I’m finding the more family history research I do, the more I’m duplicating effort. In the process of researching one person, another person will pop into my mind. I’ll look for a record for that person, rejoice in finding it, then realize I’d already found it!

So in an effort to avoid that, as well help me in my never-ending quest to not feel overwhelmed about my genealogy research, this past weekend I created a series of progress-tracking spreadsheets. I was inspired by Miriam’s Census Spreadsheet, which is a Google Doc. I’m a Mac user and I used the Numbers program (similar to Excel) to create three spreadsheets (so far) that track progress, by ancestor, on finding the following records:

Sheet 1: BMD

  1. birth records
  2. marriage records
  3. death records
  4. burial records
  5. grave photos

Sheet 2: Censuses

On the first table (pictured above) I have a row for each ancestor (this is a work in progress…I’ve been adding info a generation at a time and up to my great-great grandparents), and a column for each U.S. Census. I fill in the square in blue if that record was found. A grey square indicates the ancestor wasn’t alive for that census. A blank (white) square indicates I still need to find this record. I also have a table of state censuses, so I can note those.

Sheet 3: Military

Here I track what military records I’ve found for each ancestor, by war or conflict. This one’s definitely a work in progress.

Going through this process helped me realize how much census work I’d done and how much more work I had to do to find birth, marriage and death records. I think these charts will help me feel a sense of accomplishment and also help me hone in on work that needs to be done. I’ll keep adding ancestors from Reunion, until I’m caught up, and then plan to keep up with the spreadsheet as I find more records.

My genealogy time-management plan

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Ticking clockWhen it comes to my family history research, time management is a big challenge for me. I want to hunker in and start researching my family. But I also want to learn more techniques for doing the research. And I want to stay on top of the resources that are available out there. And I want to read other genealogy blogs, because they’re so interesting.

But there are only so many hours in a day.

Getting overwhelmed has always been a challenge for me in my research. I think it has to do with the abundance of possibilities this avocation offers. There’s so much to learn about my family and so many ways to go about learning it.

I do well with structure and I know that, for me, structure helps me deal with that overwhelmed feeling I get in the face of too many choices. (This is a theme in my life.)

So in thinking about how I might structure my genealogy research time to avoid overwhelm and actually get stuff done, this is what I’m thinking:

  • I’d like to allot a certain number of hours a week to doing family history research.
  • I’d like to divide those house among a variety of pursuits, assigning a percentage to each.

So how do I go about deciding how many hours and what percentages? It’s pretty much a crap shoot. I know from experience there’s no point in worrying about getting it right at the outset. I need to just pick a starting point and adjust as experience dictates. So here’s the goal I’m going to set for myself, for the remainder of March and the month of April (keeping in mind I’m away for a week in April where no family history work will be done).

  • I’m going to strive to work 10 hours a week on family-history-research-related activities.

I’ll try to divide those ten hours this way:

  • 50 percent on actual research about my family (5 hours)
  • 20 percent going through downloaded learning resources (2 hours)
  • 20 percent reading genealogy blogs (2 hours)
  • 10 percent organizing my family history research (1 hour)

My research is pretty well organized and I don’t have a big backlog, so an hour a week should do it. I could see needing to spend more than an hour a week organizing.

This is just a starting point. I could be way off on my percentages. I think I’ll keep a time sheet of some sort so I can see how I’m actually using family history research time and how the percentages actually shake out.

I’ll report back how it works out and whether this structure has helped.

How about you? How do you balance the research with the learning and the organizing?

Photo by R.L. Hyde via Flickr

 

Getting ready for my research trip

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This weekend is the Ancestry Day conference, sponsored by the Midwest Genealogy Center of the Mid-Continent Public Library and Ancestry.com. It’s being held near Independence, Missouri, about four hours from my home in St. Louis. I love conferences and learning opportunities, so I’m really excited to attend.

Attending the conference has given me the perfect opportunity to do a little family history research and meet more-distant family members. My mother was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, and moved with her family to Spokane, Washington, when she was three. I was born in Seattle and moved to Walla Walla, Washington, when I was five. I moved to Missouri in 1989, but have never made the trek to western Missouri to meet my mother’s cousins there.

So on Friday, I will meet several first cousins of my mother, along with her aunt (my grandfather’s sole surviving sibling) and also visit the graves of my mother’s paternal grandparents. I’m really looking forward to meeting these family members ands seeing family landmarks.

The day after the conference, I’m going to travel to Meyer Cemetery, in Hudson, Missouri, to visit the graves of my mother’s maternal grandfather, great grandparents and great great grandparents. I sure hope they have gravestones to provide me with some data. (I struck out last summer with another ancestor’s graveyard.) I had downloaded the book, Genealogy: James McKinley, 1792-1872, Richard Anderson Jeffries, 1823-1914 and Joseph Price, 1818-1904, from Scribd. It’s providing me with plot numbers for the graves in Meyer Cemetery, so I’m hopeful!

It’s already Wednesday so I’m busy trying to get myself together for my first research trip. I figure the things I need to get together are:

  • Directions (of course)
  • Registration information for the conference
  • Synched family tree on my iPhone
  • My file of handwritten (unverified) ancestry charts from previous research attempts, which provide valuable clues and which I suspect I’ll want to refer to during the conference
  • The old photos my mother has given me, in case my cousins haven’t seen them
  • The printed out pages from the e-book, containing directions to Meyer cemetery and plot numbers
  • Chargers so all my devices are working!

It’s so nice to make a list–I already feel less overwhelmed! I’ll be sure and blog about some of the insights I gain at the conference, as well as reflections upon meeting my family members.