January 1

This past summer I came across an old article from Family Tree Magazine titled 365 Ways to Discover Your Roots. It claims that I can make 2006 a breakthrough year for my family tree quest with their tip-a-day research calendar. When I saw this article back in the end of 2005, I had the best of intentions to try the 365 ways. I think I did a few days here or there but I failed back in 2006. After all, life happens, other things such as family, work, chores seem to take priority, sapping my focus and motivation.
Well its 2012 and I have decided that I am going to try each tip, each day. Hopefully I won’t miss too many days with vacations, sick days or etc.

So I am hoping  that I will stay on course  as I journey yearlong, finding way to incorporate a little family history into each day. Each day, I’ll try a tip or a task to boost my research power and know-how. I’ll follow along and hopefully I’ll wrap up 2012 a more organized, knowledgeable and enthusiastic genealogist.

January 1 – Pull out your calendar, study your genealogical to-do list and make your research resolutions, whether you want to take a family history class, bust a brick wall or finally get organized.

Well, I think I am ahead of the game. This past year, I have created a to-do genealogy folder where I place items in it that involve a field trip. My field trip is visiting county court houses back in Wisconsin. So when I go back to visit family, I have a folder where I can go and lookup up certain facts. This is how I found my great-great grandparents marriage certificate. Many other researchers had listed that they were married in Germany, however, according to Census records; it appeared they were married in the United States. I took a chance and looked up the record in the county that they appeared to have lived their entire married life and I found the record along with another generation (their parent’s names).

Also, this past year I attended my first family history seminar. It was wonderful, and that is where I got the idea to start this blog. Plus I started teaching genealogy classes at the local community college. I learned a lot while researching for the class and it was a lot of fun. I hope to teach more this spring, as long as I get people to register for the class.

However, to get organized is my most difficult task to handle. This is a never ending job. This past summer, I finally went through my stacks of genealogy magazines and threw them away. However, I tore out articles that sparked my interest or I wanted to follow up on, such as the articles that sparked this blog. I cleaned up my computer room, and created a stack of papers that I need to follow up on. But I haven’t really tackled this stack. I guess I just need to pull one or two papers from the stack each day I am at my computer and do something with the paper.

Okay, my year is pretty well planned out. I have a new tip to deal with each day, and hopefully it will force me to attack some of those tasks that we always seem to avoid.

If you need help with your genealogy research, follow along on my year journey and do each tip along with me.

HAPPY NEW YEAR and good luck in your research efforts