January 2

January 2 – Formulate several goals and develop a solid research strategy for achieving them.

Developing a genealogy research plan is the essential first step to making ancestral breakthroughs. Adapt this easy five-point strategy to suit your needs.

1.       Set an objective: What do you want to learn, your ancestor’s marriage date? His spouse’s name? Where the couple was living in 1836? Be as specific as possible

2.       Note the facts: Record what you know from original documents and records. Include names and spelling variations, family relationships and dates of birth, death and marriage

3.       Develop a hypothesis: Make some guesses based on what you know. Estimate when your ancestors married, speculate on the spouse’s name, and consider probable hometowns.

4.       Seek your sources: Research which records will likely prove (or disprove) your hypothesis. Find out if they’re available, where and in what format. List all the options.

5.       Take action: Decide the order in which you’ll seek the records, and how to get to them.

Some of my goals for this year are as follows:

1.       Find out more about John Thielke. Now that I found his parent’s name from his marriage certificate, find out siblings, when and where his parents died. I found his mother living in Wisconsin in 1860 but I don’t find John on any Census for the same year, yet he was in the US by 1860 according to a later Census record.

2.       Work on my genealogy class materials. Make adjustments to handouts and PowerPoint as needed. Get this done by the 20^th of January.

3.       Work on my Hilts and Hiltz Cousin Blog. Follow up on some leads on some of the unknown lines. Make contact with fellow researchers and see where they got their information from.

Those are my beginning goals for 2012. I know to keep them simple and go from there. As I accomplish a goal, then I can add another in its place.

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