November Genealogy To Do

Well, although I got my “new family” chart finalized (and printed beautifully), I haven’t made a decision about a way to share all the information with the couple.  In the past, I have made a sharable CD from RootsMagic but it turns out that sometimes that isn’t very viewable by the younger folks.  I’m not sure what the issue is but I hate to present something to someone that frustrates them!  So I’m considering a website, maybe through RootsMagic, or maybe with a domain name all their own.  Or maybe, in the end, I’ll just make another sharable CD and hope they can access it.

Related to this, I would like to make a small (modest) new family tree for the baby who was just born, with pictures attached to parents and grandparents.  This would be an extension of the tree I made for her parents when they got married a couple of years ago.  I’m envisioning something that could be hung on a wall in the baby’s room and looked at and talked about as she grows.   Maybe possible for her first Christmas?

My goals for November are relatively modest since the holidays are coming, and I’m hosting a family Thanksgiving this year.  First, I will continue to (go back to working on) organizing my digital files, naming them consistently in the way I have decided works best for me.  This is one of the tasks I do by 25 minute chunks of time, since that is a reasonable time limit for my frustration level.  Of course, I sometimes cannot resist going off on the tangent of looking to see if there is an update to my file, a digital image that wasn’t available before.  I must admit that many of the files I am just now organizing are a number of years old (and not-yet connected to an individual or event in my database), so it makes some sense to me to see if there is more than an index available for example.  And often enough, there is.  Familysearch.org, for example, continues to digitize birth marriage and death registers which provide more information than the index does.  On the other hand, this takes extra time and draws me down various rabbit holes.

The other tasks I need to remember to do are the computer clean-up ones:  backing up my blog posts and my genealogy databases, and scanning my harddrive for files that could be deleted and cleaning up the registry file.  I have forgotten a couple of months over the summer and need to get back in the habit of doing these tasks on a monthly basis.