November Genealogy To-Do

Although October has been officially declared to be the Family History Month, I usually think of November as being a family month as well.  It starts out with All Saints Day and All Souls Day (or Day of the Dead) where family ancestors are traditionally venerated.  Thanksgiving in the US is at the end of the month and that is certainly a family holiday if ever there was one.   We actually started the holiday season early this year in my family; in mid-October we got many of the women together and had a quilting/sewing party to make more Christmas stockings for the family celebration.  Our family has grown larger than the first set we made a number of years ago and we need more.

To briefly re-visit my October goals:  1) I haven’t managed to enter all the information from the multiple trees I brought back from England, although I have started the project.  Still hoping to figure out how to get them scanned without paying an arm and a leg.  2) I have gotten a lot of the information acquired into my database, although I haven’t even begun transcribing the 2 wills I brought back.  All of the various pages are sitting in a pile on one of the bookcases awaiting filing decisions.  3) I have saved all my pictures as .tif files and moved them to sub-directories by specific location.  I’m in the process of labeling them (boy! is that hard for some of them).  4)Lastly, I managed to write a post about our stay in Hythe and am trying to get all the travelogue-type information ready to go in a travel blog.  Not too bad – not great but not too bad overall.

I have also continued to chip away at the uncategorized, un-entered records I’ve collected for the Denman families and saved in the main genealogy file for them.  Even though I’ve made consistent progress, I still have 375 (!!) Denman files to look at, extract information from and enter in the database and finally put in the sub-directory file they belong in.  And this doesn’t count the files collected for the English Denman lines, or the Evernote files.  No wonder it’s taking me forever to do this!  I hadn’t realized how many files I had collected and just dropped in the main folder.

In service of this project, I’m trying a new principle for getting started.  First thing in the morning, instead of sitting down and reading email and looking at Facebook and checking for new podcasts and blogs, I’m immediately opening the genealogy folders and starting with the first file in line.  This seems to help and I actually have done a number of files.  I also have figured out that as I finish a file if I add “RM” to the beginning of the filename it clues me that the information has been added to my RootsMagic database.  With all the files starting with the RM they will still sort by the rest of the person name I use as a filename.  Now I just have to keep at it.

And that project, plus hosting Thanksgiving dinner for my ever-growing family, are my goals for November.  Hope everyone has a great month and a wonderful Thanksgiving.