Another year is almost over and it’s time for me to reflect on my genealogy research from this past year and decided on some goals for the new year.
The year started off rocky because a new computer I purchased during a Black Friday deal in 2022 was starting to act on the fritz. I was turning on to a blue screen of death, stating that the hard drive was not found. After working with the computer company customer support and doing some tricks, I was able to reboot properly, however it would come back hours later or the next day to that Blue Screen. Anyway, I had to send it back, twice for repairs. Once in January and once in April. Good thing, I had my laptop as a backup. Knock on Wood, it appears to be all good now. Shhhhh, let’s not say that too loud.
I started the year with a new tool, I purchased a Clever Fox planner to keep track of my projects and such. It was undated and thus I had to enter the dates. It had a monthly at glance calendar and weekly pages where I could write in more detail. The planner was very useful, the lesson I learned, I need to fill out all the dates ahead of time, instead of waiting until the month started. Therefore, in my new 2024 journal, I have already done that. Thus, reviewing my genealogy research has been simplified because of this journal.
I started with five basic goals:
1.) Participate in the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks created by Amy Johnson Crow. I wanted to do more post this past year than I did the previous year. Therefore, I needed to do 28 or more post in 2023 and I accomplished 35. What was really exciting, in the weekly email’s that Amy sends out, my blog post was spotlighted several times during the year. I wish I had noted which ones were spotlighted. If I had to guess, looking at the number of views for each post, I see that nine of them jumped into triple digits, while the rest remained under 50 views.
2.) Work on my Hiltz/Hilts Project. This project is for my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. I did start this project, I was working through a book that was published on the Canadian Hilts and I added them into my tree from this book, doing additional research as I went. This project wasn’t completed because I became sided tracked with my next goal.
3.) Work on the second edition of the Steffes Family book for my sister-in-law Jane. I hadn’t really planned on doing this into 2023, however, at a family reunion in August of 2022, Jane promised family members an update to the book I produced in 2022. I told her I wasn’t doing anymore updates after this edition. I also explained, that normally, I wouldn’t do an update this fast, I would give it 5 years for people to review the first book to find errors or omissions. I did complete this goal and sold about 13 books. I would have figured more, based on the size of this family, but I did learn a lot. I used Family Book Creator to create this book and it was very exciting.
4.) Clean up my paper files. I ended up instead shredding other paperwork that I ended up moving with because I didn’t have time to shred everything before moving from Arizona to Wisconsin in 2020. The boxes of paperwork, had been sitting in my daughter’s garage and I decided to take it home and shred this stuff. I could only do about an hour of shredding before the shredder became hot. But I managed to shred all the boxes. YAHOO!
5.) Slides Project – review, select and scan slides from my father’s collection. I quickly put this project on hold because of the scope of the project and the time I was spending on my sister-in-law’s book.
Other projects I started that I had not anticipated. I started a project to research, one of my 3rd great grandparent’s descendants. It was a branch that I hadn’t really looked at. I decided I wanted to do a book on the descendants, after doing the book for my sister-in-law. I found out quickly, that this family has lots of descendants. This project didn’t proceed as fast as I liked because one of my sister-in-law’s cousins wanted me to do a book on her family, similar to the Steffes family, which she is one of.
Thus, this project was an experiment, to see if this is something I wanted to do as a side “hustle” to earn money. I am almost done with the project; I believe I can wrap it up in January of 2024. I realized that I would need to charge a hefty fee for this project. I started with a tree of about 700 people and ended up with a tree of more than 1500 people. Then she had lots of pictures to add, that I had to scan. Besides the main descendant book, she wanted me to do, two short additions/appendixes for two other lines that married into the main family, both are her direct ancestor’s lines. I learned, that I would have to charge at least $3,000 to take on such a project. I would need to define the scope from the beginning, since she expanded the scope with the two additional lines. When I sell the book, I will make some money back, but nothing close to the time I spent on this project. It was a good lesson to learn, I don’t regret this lesson. I learned even more about Family Book Creator that I can take into making my own book projects.
Looking ahead into 2024, I have some goals that I decided to set.
1.) I will participate in the 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks; however, I will not put so much pressure to get more posts than last year. Hopefully, it will just happen because of the habit I have of writing a weekly post.
2.) I am starting a daily genealogy tip post on my other blog “Out on a Limb Genealogy” based on an article in Family Tree Magazine, January/February 2024 issue. I will create the weeks’ worth of individual blog posts and schedule them to be released during the next week. I did a similar project back in 2012 and I really enjoyed it. Goal 1 and 2 can be done on the same day of the week.
3.) Finish the Jones Book for my sister-in-law’s cousin. I plan on finishing this in January, I am on the last step of combining the main section to the appendix sections. This might take a few tries to get it correct. I need to read up on how to do this in Word.
4.) Continue the Goodwin Descendant project. This is the 3rd great grandparents that I started researching in 2023. After I finish the Jones book, I will go back to this project. This is my major research project for the year. I want to find all the descendants that I can, then look at the DNA matches and see if I have them in the tree, if not, then research to add them. Finally create a descendant book where I identify my DNA matches. I want to create descendant books on all my immigrant ancestors as a way to preserve my research. If I can spend at least one day a week on this project, I should be accomplishing a lot. I probably can spend more than one day, but I am doing some home improvement projects too.
5.) Clean up my paper files. I need to really revisit this project, when I was reorganizing my office this past year, I came across these stacks of papers again. I need to do at least one hour of review, scan and shred or file papers before I start my genealogy research for the day.
How did you do this past year? What are some goals for 2024?
Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!
No comments:
Post a Comment