Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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.

Time for a mid-month check in!

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It’s the middle of March and we’re in the middle of a 30 x 30 challenge. Now’s your chance to let us know it’s going for you!

I have to admit that it is not going well for me. At all. I’ve been very busy with organizing clients (yay!) and my spare time seems to be spent obsessing over the current COVID-19 crisis. I’m spending more time than I should, probably, reading and stressing. I think I’d be better off focusing on my ancestors, but that’s just not happening. (Today over on my organizing blog, I wrote about making the most of your time at home; I should take my own advice and do more family history research!)

I sincerely hope that it’s going better for you and that I have a better report at the end of the month–I haven’t given up! Please let us know how your challenge is going!

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.