Another year is about to bite the dust (didn’t it go fast?) and it’s time to make some New Year’s Genealogical Resolutions! Genealogy is one of those hobbies where it is important to stop and take stock of where you’re up to and what you’re doing every so often. It helps you to keep on the right track, remain focussed and improve your habits and effectiveness at compiling your family tree.
Here are my genealogical resolutions for 2020! I would probably be staying inside to avoid the extremes of the hot summer weather anyway, I may as well do useful things!
Genealogical Resolution 1: Reboot my desk
No matter how well-organised I try to be with the filing of my work, when I am researching multiple lines and using lots of different sources for each, my immediate vicinity can start to resemble a mountain range of paperwork and open books very easily! I am using the quiet time after the holiday season to reorganise my desk. I will reduce it down to only the priority work I am currently doing (i.e. client research). The rest (i.e. my personal research!) can be filed. To prevent me from worrying about forgetting to follow up a line that’s on ‘pause’ at the moment, I can create a spreadsheet of things to return to.
Genealogical Resolution 2: Get on top of correspondence
Like many of us, I get a huge number of emails every day. A large proportion of them is genealogy-related. Anything professional, I deal with immediately. Personal ones tend, like my personal research, to often be shunted to one side for ‘when I have time’. I rarely do! This pile, being electronic, doesn’t loom like the physical things on a desk. But it’s no less mortifying.
I’m going to tackle this one a piece at a time and chip away at it. It may take me the full year to get it back to something manageable. But if people have written with queries, even if I can see they are researching a completely different Mary Smith, they deserve the courtesy of a response. This is one I constantly feel guilty about, so it has to be done.
Genealogical Resolution 3: Explore new DNA tools
I manage not only my own DNA but that of many of my family members, and over multiple testing sites. This contributes to a lot of the correspondence I have fallen behind in! Genetic genealogy has grown a lot in the nine years since I first tested. It’s absolutely boomed in the last couple of years as it’s become not only a mainstream genealogical research method but also popular in the non-genealogical community. I even heard an AncestryDNA advertisement on a major radio station which caters to the youth demographic yesterday!
Unsurprisingly, this growth means that new tools to help make sense of the data are popping up rapidly all over the place. Several of these are extremely exciting. The sheer number of them I want to explore seems to be inversely proportional to my free time lately. My DNA genealogical resolution is to schedule some ‘DNA Playtime’. If I don’t do this just to practice with some of the new tools I run the risk of falling behind. In particular, I want to try out the new ‘auto trees’ feature at Genetic Affairs, work out what I’m doing with Genetic Family, and do some exploring at Borland Genetics. I also want to fully utilise DNA Painter and the WATO tool, which I’ve had some really good results with already!
Genealogical Resolution 4: Finish writing my book
Quite often in this blog, I tell little stories about my ancestors. There is one you haven’t and won’t hear about here. Her tale is such an interesting, and ultimately tragic one that I am turning it into a book. In my spare time. Are you sensing a theme here?
Nonetheless, the story of Leah Swinbourne, my maternal great-grandmother WILL be completed, and hopefully published by the end of 2020.
Genealogical Resolution 5: Get the most out of my subscriptions and memberships
I love having access to databases to access information online. Some, like Familysearch, Internet Archive and Trove, are completely free to use. None, whether free or not, will contain everything that I need to access. My research covers many corners of the world. I need access to more than just births, deaths, marriages and censuses. Therefore, I need multiple subscriptions to paid databases. So that’s what I do. And then, being human, I spend 90% of my time in just a handful of them.
This year, I will actively remind myself to check the more obscure ones regularly. Perhaps it may be worth my while to check if they also offer the purchase of credits rather than subscriptions. In some cases, it could be more cost-effective to use them in this way if they are perfectly wonderful but only visited a few times a year for a unique dataset!
Genealogical Resolution 6: Find one new research resource a week
Now this one might sound silly. The overwhelming theme throughout this blog has been that I don’t have enough time to use all the data (whether documents or DNA) that I have access to already. Why would I continue to look for more resources?
The answer is simple. There are wonderful new resources coming online all the time. We are only scraping the surface of the archival material that is out there waiting to be digitised. Also, our research often goes off into different geographical or occupational directions so different resources may help. I am always on the lookout for a site that will search several databases at once too. I will be in heaven if anyone manages to come up with something that will search all the genealogical databases at once. Familysearch has made a start in that direction. A reminder to anyone looking for genealogical resources on a specific topic – the first stop should always be Cyndi’s List. If you can’t find anything there, it probably doesn’t exist!
So that’s my six genealogical resolutions for 2020. I’m looking forward to this year of consolidation and moving forward more effectively. Working out how to balance my professional and personal research time is key – this has been my first year of genealogy being both my hobby and my profession. It’s been wonderful and also challenging!
Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2020. What will your genealogical resolutions be?