Research Update - January 2021

Hard to believe that the first month of the new year is almost over.  The beginning of the year is usually the time where one makes resolutions or states research goals.

2020 was a crazy year with a lot of changes.  Working remote with the pandemic, I thought I'd have more time to dedicate to my genealogical research, but instead I had less. Making sure the job was getting done lead to some long hours and my energy level to write blog posts was non-existent. Shame on me for not keeping a journal of all of the thoughts and feelings we've dealt with during this time.

If you look at this blog, you'll notice I didn't post nearly as much as I had in the past.  That didn't mean I didn't do any research, I just couldn't muster the desire to write posts.

My morning routine through most of 2020 was to work on adding burial locations from Find-A-Grave in to my Rootsmagic database before work. This led to me adding a lot of individual facts, but not really any true research.  Part of the year I posted the journals of my maternal great-aunt Vera - a project that didn't get completed.

Though I'm not going to call it a resolution - I do have a goal in 2021 - and that is to get organized.  I've studied methods such as the Genealogy Do-Over or Research Like A Pro before but never taken the plunge.

With goals of passing the research on to the next generation and joining lineage societies, I've decided to spend my January getting orginized - starting with my digital files.  Though I have Dropbox folders to segment most of my files, so many recent Camera Uploads and miscellaneous files have no identification other than the file names created by the scanner or iPhone.

Each morning I've been slowly working to label the images and get them sorted into my main Genealogy files in Dropbox.  So far the progress has been good, but it's daunting.  Finding duplicate files, misnamed as well as the unnamed ones.  I'd better get them labelled before something happens to me and the information is lost.

Once I can get a handle on what I have, my next steps will be to systematically work through my lineage and make sure I have documentation to prove each generation.  Those lines that I already have enough documentation will be used to apply to lineage societies to preserve the work.  Additionally, I hope to share more photos and information via this blog and social media.

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step...."