August Genealogy To-Do List

I’m hearing choruses of locusts on my morning walks these days and being transported back to my childhood days in the middle of Indiana.  The weather has felt a lot like my childhood memories as well:  hot and very humid.  Thankfully I now have air-conditioning which we didn’t when I was a child.  And it is certainly a nice contrast to the very cold and snowy winter just past.  I am reminded to slow down and pay attention to my surroundings.

It feels like I need to change my monthly title and theme for these posts.  I don’t seem to follow the goals I set very faithfully.  This makes me think that I need a reboot or “do-over” of this idea as well as of my genealogy.  I don’t know yet what I might try or even what I really want this regular post to accomplish, so it will be a work in progress.

August is shaping up nicely as a relatively quiet month, broken most noticeably by a visit from my sister-in-law and her grandson.  This is a major deal around here!  I also have a visit to the National Archives at Boston again with a friend planned toward the end of the month.  I am working to make connections in my husband’s family tree with three families in Connecticut who might have been cousins on his mother’s side.  Since this is a line we know very little about I am excited to try to find out more.  I did get the naturalization papers for each family from the Archives and need to find out what other resources are available.

Judy and I have locked in a week to go to Salt Lake City to the Family History Library and I am very excited!  I have a picture in my mind about how I want to organize my planned research.  Now to see if I can make it real.  I have started to list the different areas I want to research (e.g., missing vital record for my direct lines) and am collecting film numbers from familysearch.org.   I am using Evernote for this collection.  I envision creating a spreadsheet or list that includes the person’s name and the record to be found and the film number.  Maybe I need the location of where the record was created (like state and county).  I think if I can at least start with a spreadsheet I can then sort and see where I have more than one item from the same film.  Sounds good, right?  Doing this is my major goal for August, since we’re planning to go in September.