December Genealogy To-Do List

Well November has flown by with not nearly enough hours in each day or enough days in a week to accomplish everything.  We had snow on the ground twice, although the first time, early in the month, hardly counted since it didn’t even completely cover things.  The second time was over Thanksgiving but did not cancel any of the family’s traveling.  So, as I start to pull my thoughts together for my genealogy projects for December, there is snow on the ground and the temperature is low.  A good time to be inside.

Not a lot of genealogy work got done in November but I did manage to go through each of my direct ancestors in my RootsMagic database back through my great great grandparents and enter all the vital information I have on each.  This allowed me to create a list (in Evernote but I need to make it a spreadsheet) of what is missing for each person.  By doing this I cleaned up a small amount of the “obtained but not used” pieces of information sitting in the various family name files.  I did also go back and check quickly to see if any of the indexed but not digitized things had now been digitized.  The big online sources do so much and add so many records that it is always worth checking again.

I once heard Josh Taylor say that he had taken a year off from adding to his own research and devoted that time to organizing his information and files.  He has an impressive system set up.  At the time I couldn’t quite imagine taking that much time to do nothing but clean-up, but I seem to have fallen into doing a lot of it.  Which certainly needs doing.  What happens, regardless of how I have set up my work process, is that I find myself checking for an additional piece of evidence that I am reminded of by my organizing.  So while I am spending much of my genealogy time on organizing, I am also adding to my information and clarifying relationships.

I have 2 more posts I want to write about my part of the England trip experience (that is, the genealogical rather than the sightseeing).  One of these will get done for December.

The last project I hope to get started on is to begin reading one of the myriad Evernote how-to books that are available for Kindles, periodically for free (my favorite price!).  I use Evernote a lot but know that I am not as efficient about it as I could be, and I’m interested in how to better use it to track my research.

These plus the holidays that rapidly approach will keep me plenty busy but in pleasant ways.  My fingers are crossed for not too much more snow here in December so we all can get done what needs doing.  Happy holidays to all!