Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Finding the time for research

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I love doing family history research, but I have to admit that it can be challenging to carve out the time to do it.

Part of the reason is that I always think I want a large chunk of time to work with. I know that once I sink my teeth into a research challenge, it can be hard to stop. But I also know that if I wait until I have a large chunk of time, I may be waiting a very long time. (This is true of so many things, especially decluttering. On my organizing business’s blog, I’ve talked about the power of working on things just a few minutes at a time.)

Yesterday, I had an afternoon without outside obligations. I’m just back from visiting my parents and I have a (non-genealogy) to-do list as long as my arm. But I decided to take some time out to check out the genealogy room at the newly re-opened Central Branch of the St. Louis Public Library in downtown St. Louis. The library was closed for renovation for over a year and it’s a sight to behold. I took the opportunity to acquaint myself with the genealogical holdings of the library and am very excited to make use of this resource.

Another day soon I want to check out an LDS FamilySearch Center here in St. Louis. Taking the time to actually leave my office to check out resources or do some research sometimes can feel really challenging. But I know it’s how I’ll actually manage to make some real progress in my family history research, something I really want to do in the coming year.

Making time for family history research (or any other hobby) is about priorities. I want to make this a big priority for 2013. And I look forward to talking here about some of the progress I make!

Just do something

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One of the goals of this blog is to help readers not feel overwhelmed when it comes to their family history research. I got so overwhelmed some years back that I stopped doing it all together.

I advise my organizing clients who feel overwhelmed to break the project down into tiny components and just do something, anything. I also suggest setting a timer for 15 or 30 minutes. Telling yourself you can stop when the timer goes off is a great way to get past that overwhelmed feeling.

With genealogy research, I’m usually eager to do the work, but sometimes there are so many options I can’t figure out where to start. “What should I work on today?” is a question I ask myself all the time. And if I don’t quickly figure out the answer to that question, the time slot I’ve set aside from research can degenerate into indiscriminate web surfing or watching of Project Runway or something on the Internet.

I was delighted to see in the October/November 2012 of Family Tree Magazine an article called Weekend Warrior that lists seven genealogical projects that can be accomplished in a weekend. The ideas in the article, like locate your family’s grave, solve immigration mysteries, find patriot ancestors in the Daughters of the American Revolution Database, will lead me on paths I haven’t explored before. And the article provides starting points for all those quests.

Even better from a “just do something” perspective is the article’s sidebar called “Quick Fixes,” which lists five genealogy tasks you can do in thirty minutes or less. Last weekend, when I wanted to sit down for just a little while to work on my research, I pulled out this sidebar and started searching for genealogy and historical societies and libraries from my ancestors’ hometowns. That particular task had never occurred to me.

If you feel overwhelmed when you think about doing family history research, please take my advice. Just do something to get the ball rolling and feel the thrill of discovery. Write down your findings (with sources). Then come back for more later!

What should I work on today?

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I try to work on family history research at least once a week. (Writing a post on this blog twice a week has helped motivate me!)  I appreciate that I have the time to work on it that frequently, but I’ve discovered that sometimes it seems not quite frequent enough to keep my momentum going. By the time another week rolls around, I can’t quite remember where I left off and I don’t know what I should work on.

I know from my experience as a professional organizer that not knowing where to start can be paralyzing. I see this in my clients who are dealing with a lot of clutter: they can’t figure out where to start, so they don’t start at all.

This happened to me last Saturday. When I sat down to work on genealogy research, I couldn’t think of where to start. Of course, the truth is that I can start literally anywhere on my family tree. There’s always something to work on. I’m working my way up my tree and sometimes when I make a link to a new generation, I’ll skip ahead to work on finding information about those folks, even when there’s still plenty of information to seek on a generation closer to me in time.

So I could play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey when it comes to my family tree and pick any relative and start looking for more information on them. But I’m not keen on such a random approach (though that might be fun to try some day).

As it turned out, last weekend, I remembered that I’d found military information on an ancestor in a family history I’d downloaded, which led to some fun exploration.

At one point, when I first got back into this research, I kept a hand written research journal, which I filled out at the end of each research session and one of the items I would enter is next steps. Somehow, that has fallen by the wayside, but it would be a good habit to get back into.

Here are some ways I can think of to make sure that I don’t get paralyzed or delayed by the “what should I work on” question:

  • Keep a running list of questions to research. When I come across something I want to look into further (but don’t have time to research at that moment), I can add it to the list
  • Keep a “next steps” journal that I add to at the end of each research session
  • Start an electronic checklist for each ancestor of items to research, so I can tell at a glance what information is still up for grabs
  • Pick an ancestor at random and start exploring
  • On the other end of the spectrum, I could set up a very systematic approach and work through a single surname before I move to another

My personality is such that a systematic approach would feel constricting. I think keeping a list of things to work on and selecting the puzzle that jumps out at me that day is probably what’s going to work for me.

The key here, I think, is to know that there’s no wrong answer to the question, “What should I work on now?” That’s the beauty of this research. As long as I’m documenting what I find so that I don’t end up spending loads of times on false leads, any research I do is productive.

Using little snippets of time

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I think one thing that made me put off doing family history research for all these years (besides feeling overwhelmed and incompetent) was that I always felt like I needed a giant chunk of time before I could start a research session.

While it’s true that time flies when I’m researching and I can easily use a large chunk of time, it’s not a requirement. Yesterday at about 5:00 I thought about what I’d like to do next with my day. One option was entering financial data into Quickbooks. Family history research was a much more attractive prospect!

I ended up researching for about two hours. In that time, I found one couple (a pair of great great grandparents) on five censuses, thanks to Ancestry.com. I carefully documented what I learned from the censuses into my family tree in Reunion. And it felt great!

Next time you’re tempted to do a little research, but hesitate because you don’t have a whole lot of time, I say go for it!