 |
| Français : Jeanne Calment's birth certificate (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
GENEALOGY RESEARCH RESOLUTIONS FOR 2014
Everyone makes resolutions. They’re not always dependent on surviving New Year’s Eve! That’s mostly because we all make genealogical resolutions year round. “I’m going organize those census records” or “These birth certificates should be filed with the correct families”…. The list goes on.
So maybe it’s time to make a real, honest to goodness, I’m-going-to-do-it-this-time, genealogical resolution. Great! Now where do we start? That’s the hardest question to ask yourself most of the time. In other words, what are your priorities? It’s a new year, so maybe it’s a good time to decide the absolutely most important project that you’ve dreaded and, as a result, put off for weeks or maybe months.
It could be a result of what I’d call “pin-ball research”. You know how that works. You finally find the census record for your great uncle who lived in a small town in West Virginia. But before you get a chance to transcribe those precious tidbits of information, you happen to notice another family that sounds familiar. So off you go, checking out a family that has nothing to do with your great uncle. But it’s really interesting! So you start tracking the “interesting” family---“I won’t forget to get back to Uncle Whatever”---then you find a newspaper article from the depression era that has a very pitiful story that you can’t take your eyes off. And then... “How’d I get here?” Here’s a suggestion: Finish Uncle Whatever, but make notes on what it was that ALMOST distracted you so you can get back to that later.
It’s a matter of discipline and focus. If you’re like most folks, it’s hard to be strictly disciplined with regard to scheduling a regular time to tend to your research. Life has a tendency to interfere! But we’re not talking about punching a time clock here; we’re just trying to put aside a block of time and when that time is over, it’s over! There’s another day with another block of time to deal with another priority.
If you’re like me, you have a gazillion projects with twice as many sticky notes and pads of paper with “important” stuff. I know that I need to set aside some time to sort through it all, save what needs to be saved and toss anything that’s just been hanging around too long, making that big pile on my desk look too daunting to tackle. I've done it before and it is past the time to do it again. I know that I always feel better and I ALWAYS find notes and folders and whatnot that I've been hunting for.
To sum it all up, resolve to clear the decks, organize, file, purge and prioritize. It’s always easier to work when your head is clear and your goals are clearer. Tackle one project and one element of that project at a time. Track you progress with research notes describing where you've been so that you don’t have to retrace your steps weeks down the road. You won’t be fretting about whether you did this or that because you've written down the steps you've taken with each project.
Coming up: What can we do now that a new law has privatized the Social Security Death Index which has always been a valuable research tool?
