April Genealogy To-Do List

There is a nor’easter headed for New England and I am planning not to have to leave the house tomorrow.  With any luck the electricity will stay on, and I will have a genealogy day all to myself.  Fingers crossed!

Research

• process 4 more headstone photos from my first Ashford cemetery trip (August 2009). [I’m finally making actual progress on this goal. I have settled on several templates for how to do this sort of work which feel ok to me – I realized that there is no right/wrong answer, but that settling on a standard way of doing is the important thing. I have now done that, and am now making progress on my digital images of gravestone. YAY!! Best of all I figured out how to add metadata to each file that gives all the information about the image. I got sidetracked going back to add some of the headstone pictures I took on a trip to Ohio in 2005, and so I added at least 4 of those as well as some Ashford ones in March.]
• continue to look for sources for births/marriages/deaths of direct line ancestors as part of sourcing goal. [I received more photocopies from the FHL in March and added them to my sources in my database. I also sent for another set of records, mostly marriages toward the end of March.]
• continue to try to track the current owners of the old Salt house to get some information. This has been on a back burner and I want to bring it to the front this month.
• success with tracking the original Denman deed! I talked with the Town Clerk in Neversink and then the next day with the source she recommended and I met a new cousin (well, his wife). We had a very nice conversation and I learned a little about how they fit into my family tree. Best of all there may be a picture of the original William Denman.

Writing

• write at least 2 blog posts (plus To-Do list) [Since I don’t have a current goal for other genealogical writing I am going to remove this category from my To-Do list. First, though, I have to come up with another category to take its place. Gotta keep myself moving forward.]

Organization

• copy marriage sources for Dan’s side in Clooz to RootsMagic (sourcing each certificate and attaching to individual who is primary) [I got some of these done in March but not all, so it’s on the list to finish up in April.]
• process info in one file in Research Notes 2010 directory (enter into RootsMagic; move file to appropriate directory) [I got another one done in March and will continue to plug away at this goal. Since this is one more place I have stashed info, I need to catch up with myself on this one, so I don’t re-invent the wheel too many times.]
• create the database of images scanned and labelled with metadata.

Education

• watch one online video about genealogy [I watched Thomas MacEntee’s webinar on backing up your data in March, although I couldn’t attend live. Not strictly genealogy education but important. I think this month I’ll watch another RootsMagic webinar, since learning how to use the program more effectively can only be helpful.]