Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

How’s your 30 x 30 challenge going?

By 14 Comments

We’re halfway through April and a good number of you said you were going to participate in the April 30 x 30 challenge in which we vow to do something genealogy-related for 30 minutes each day throughout the 30 days of the month.

How’s it going? Have you been able to make that daily effort? Is it paying dividends?

I haven’t missed a day yet, I’m happy to say, but I haven’t been able to do much more than 30 minutes either. Because I have a backlog of documents to process, it feels like a little bit of drudgery, I’m afraid. But I know I’ll get through it, even if all I can do is work on it 30 minutes at a time.

I’m going to spend some time thinking about how to deal with the backlog without it feeling like drudgery and I plan to blog about that soon.

If you’re participating in the 30 x 30 challenge (or would like to), please comment and let us know how it’s going!

Let’s start an April 30 x 30 challenge

By 37 Comments

Time to start a new 30 x 30 challenge! Would you like to join me in committing to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or organizing genealogy research, or doing anything genealogy related) every day for 30 days? We’ll start on April 1 and end on April 30.

I’d been doing really well with daily research for seven months, into late March. But then my father had a health crisis, which caused me to drop everything and travel to Washington state. He’s fine now, but I stuck around to take him to follow up appointments and make sure he’s okay. I’ve been here almost a week and haven’t had an opportunity to do any research at all. So a 30 x 30 challenge will help me get back into the groove. I return home on April 2 and I’ll do my best to get some research time in on April 1. (I’m hampered here by the fact he doesn’t have wifi in his condo.)

Who’s in? If you’d like to join the challenge, make a comment below. Feel free to share what your commitment is; customize the challenge so it works for you. For me, I’ll either research or organize my research in those 30 minutes daily.

Overwhelm rears its ugly head

By 11 Comments

In the past, I was easily overwhelmed by my genealogy research. As my tree grew, so did my opportunities for research. I would sit down to research with no idea what to work on. A few years ago, I implemented a quarterly plan, where I would focus on one line per quarter, which helped narrow things down. That helped somewhat.

My focus got better when I implemented a few practices:

  • I decided to focus on one line (my Adams line) all year. That was last year, and this year, I’ve been sticking with the Adams family.
  • I started keeping an informal research log. At the end of each session, I write down next steps.
  • I consistently research every day, even if it’s as little as 15 minutes. That keeps my head in the game and means I don’t have to refamiliarize myself with my research at the beginning of the session.

Things were going along very well for the last six to nine months. Then I went to RootsTech.

The double-edged sword of being focused is that you get a lot done, but you have blinders on about other avenues or opportunities for research. RootsTech stripped off those blinders and I took lots of notes about possible things to research. I also came back from the conference with a busy client schedule and not as much time for research.

The result? I feel like I’m floundering a bit. I’m still researching daily. I’m still writing down next steps, but I’m a bit all over the place.

So today, I’m resolving to regain focus. My intention is to do that by choosing a project I can complete in a reasonable amount of time, one that has a clear start and finish. I have a bunch of unprocessed documents in my Surnames folder. As part of my digital workflow, I’m supposed to process all documents as I download them, but when I was at the Family History Library right before RootsTech I wasn’t able to do that. I’m going to focus on extracting data from those documents and filing them properly. In the case of the handwritten deeds I downloaded, I’ll also transcribe them.

I’m already feeling better because I have a focus, I know what I’ll be working on and I’ll be doing so systematically until I finish. When I come across other leads, I’ll write them down in my follow up folders in Evernote. (I keep follow up folders by surname in my Genealogy stack.) I’m hopeful that by the time I finish with this project I’ll have my mojo back and be able to stave off those feelings of overwhelm!

Keep your eyes out for a new 30 x 30 challenge in April. I’m going to need one!

Unmodified photo by Chris Duglosz via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Report in: How’d the January 30 x 30 challenge go?

By 4 Comments

For those of you who participated in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge, in which you committed to doing 30 minutes of genealogy-related activity for 30 days in a row, how’d it go?

I actually missed a day, for the first time since August 1. I typically research first thing in the morning but on Saturday I had to be up and out of the house to get to the Apple store when it opened (my phone had died) and then the rest of the day went by in a blur and I forgot to research. So that speaks to the power of daily routine. I’m definitely best off if I can research in the morning and I try to plan the time I wake up around it. (That Saturday I couldn’t get myself to get up earlier, because I’d had a late night the night before.)

So that’s my true confession. How did the rest of you do? Even if you weren’t able to do 30 days in a row, was the effort at least beneficial? I’d love to hear!

Join the mailing list!

When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.