October Genealogy To-Do List

1.  I will make a sharable family tree for my nephew and his wife, to finish the new family tree project.  I finally (!!) got the chart I wanted made – a bowtie chart with the couple at the middle and their parents, grandparents, etc. moving out from them on the right and the left.  This was possible using RootsMagic, my database, but not simple.  I still think someone, somewhere, should make a chart like this possible without the manipulations I had to go through in RootsMagic.

2.  I will separate and connect each file or piece of information that I found on our Washington DC trip to the person or people in my datebase that it is connected to and make sure it is filed in the correct computer folder.  This is complicated by the fact that I have digital images of scans, digital images taken with my cell phone (which are in Dropbox), and paper items copied at the DAR Library.  I need to consolidate all these and name the files before I can add them to my database or move to the appropriate computer folder.

I did a reasonable job of preparing ahead for this trip, and had two checklists that I took with me to keep me on track (one for NARA and one for the DAR Library).  I mostly focused on military pensions at NARA, and both used the fold3 database available there and requested paper files of things not-yet-scanned.  For three of the paper files I utilized the Innovation Hub option – you have the file delivered to that area and scan it yourself.  This was fun, although tiring, work and I like feeling like I contributed several digitized files to the genealogy cause.  The Innovation Hub is a crowdsourcing effort to get files never microfilmed digitized so that researchers can use the images and the increasingly fragile paper can be safeguarded.