Category: Organization

There is a mess, but I will clean it up!

Hey guys, so I’ve got everything back into place that I need to spruce the place up again. When I switched hosting companies before, I wasn’t completely happy with the behind the scenes functions. I’ve switched to Hostinger, and I’m loving it a lot right now. That said, there is a bunch of broken image links. What happened was the blog used to live at moore-mays.org/blog and now it just lives at moore-mays.org. That causes quite a lot of backend issues. I probably could have manually updated my backup file before uploading back to the site, but I definitely didn’t do that and that’s okay. I really wanted to take a look at things and organize other aspects as well. If you have a specific post you need up. Let me know, and I’ll move it up the priority list.

I’ve been doing a lot of new research and trying to do research reports for each line. So I am going to be updating here with all the new records and findings and adventures. Also the misadventures, because I’m very much an oops person. Mostly I really missed having this creative outlet. So I’m excited to fix the website up and bring her back to glory. I’d have to check the records, but I’m pretty sure we are over 20 years and counting for the domain name. My blog entries started in 2010. Granted, I have taken a huge break in the blog and I’m not putting myself in any kind of pressure situation. I’m just aiming to write here and if someone reads it, then awesome. I just want to get my research out to my distant and close cousins who are interested in seeing it.

Continue reading “We Are So Back” →

Llewellyn Thorward-Moore, standing in front of flowers. Unknown location. Unknown time, but definitely a time before the internet.

Well, I’m still here, trying to get back into my genealogy research. I’m also dealing with quite a bit of internet downtime. So the frustration level is high. Then I remind myself, there are things you can do while the internet is down.

Continue reading “Still here” →

Okay, I missed some 52 Ancestors posts, but for a good reason! I was in Florida for a week visiting my niece and nephew for their first birthdays and just didn’t get the time managed to post. Now that I am home, I am facing a whole new challenge. With a new round of the Genealogy Do-Over starting in January, I wanted to re-assess my processes and where I am currently at with my research.

What I am doing right

• The great news is I’m still doing things in a very methodical way. I am using documents and entering data first into Evidentia, then into my genealogy management program, and then into my Research Log. Once that is done, I update my checklist in Excel.
• I haven’t entered any further ahead then what the documents show. Sometimes this is hard, especially as I’m trying to catch up on answering genealogy e-mails. I’m even thinking about a way of logging who I’ve talked to about what and how long it’s been since I communicated. That way I can start with the oldest response and work my way forward.

What I need to Improve

• At some point, it got way too overwhelming to try and keep so many trees synced. My Legacy file is my most up to date, but at some point because of Ancestry’s hinting system, I just deleted my fresh tree and started updating my oldest tree there as I went. Which obviously provides a huge problem. Working with the old tree is not working for me. It makes me want to leap ahead, it tempts me to make assumptions. So now I feel like I should go back to a fresh tree. I could upload a Gedcom later, but then it wouldn’t be linked to my sources. That defeats the purpose of what I was trying to do. I’m trying to put well sourced, documented trees up on every site I can. I thought the old one was better because it was attached to my DNA results, but now I’m just not sure. I stopped making changes to all online trees except for the Ancestry DNA tree.  Trying to keep everything up to date on Ancestry, Find My Past, My Heritage, Family Search, and various Family Tree DNA sites was just too much!
• When I started my Do-Over, I moved ALL digital files onto a separate drive and titled the folder “Hold Over”. I haven’t touched it since. That means there are pictures, documents, and various other things over there that need to be brought over and organized. I assumed I would do that as I went as well. My previous numbering system made it very hard to tell which documents I had for different people. One of the things I’m trying to do is to rename everything over in the old folder to my new system so I can at least see what I have. A lot of them are digital files that will be able to be deleted as I go along, but some of them are scans of purchased documents and I don’t want to miss those by accident.

It’s not all bad

Despite what my bullet points say, I am doing really well with this process. I feel like I am taking more time to analyze things and to organize them which was my point in starting over in the first place. With a quick adjustment, I think it’s going to start coming along nicely again. I’ve hesitated to work on it because I was still trying to decide what to do about those other trees.

What do you guys do about trees on various sites? Do you upload Gedcoms or do you manually enter in? Is my over-thinking nature coming out again, does it even matter?

Okay, so lets just get down to it. There were a few things I made sure to do before leaving for Florida in February. I knew I was going to be staying for 2 months and that I wouldn’t have any paper records with me.

The Prep

The first thing I did was scan all the remaining documents in my “Binder Indexes” file. I wanted to make sure that I had a digital copy of everything that was listed on that index. Who knows what could happen while I was gone? I might need them for information. There might be a fire and I lose everything. Someone could breaking into my house and steal all my genealogy documents. You never know!

Next was the question of how do I access what I need from 1000 miles from home. One option was to move all my digital files over to my laptop, but I didn’t want to go that route. Another option was to move things onto a flash drive. Those are so vulnerable to damage and loss, especially with traveling, so I nixed that idea. The best option for me ended up being my cloud storage through Microsoft. Our family shares a 365 subscription, this gives me 1 TB of storage included in our subscription. This involved moving my family file to the cloud and then copying all my document files and pictures over.

Continue reading “Genealogy Do-Over: An Update after Traveling” →

Great News!

It’s a mess around my house these days! That’s not the great news though. We’re preparing for a trip to Florida! We aren’t going to enjoy the warm sun. We aren’t going to kick back on the beach. We’re going to welcome the newest generation into the family!

That’s right my brother and his beautiful wife are expecting twins! This isn’t the first set of twins my family has welcomed over the generations but they are my parent’s first grandchildren. That makes them extra special. My sister in law has asked me to help her out by staying a little longer than everyone else. I’m the only one in my family with a flexible enough schedule, so I think I’m going to take her up on that! This means I will be away from my natural habitat until early April.

What about your Do-Over? What about your blog?

I’m still going to be working on it! That’s what I’m loving about my Do-Over. The great thing about it is that I’m still only entering in the information I already have. I’m still not entering in any new information. Before we leave next week, I’ll be scanning like crazy to make sure all the documents I might need are on my laptop. I’m going to hope with a little preparation I can transfer my family file from my desktop to my laptop and back again. We’ll see how that goes! I might even make a blog entry about it. I’m going to utilize my 1TB of space in OneDrive to keep a cloud backup going of my files but to also help the transition from Maryland to Florida and back to Maryland.

I can’t make any promises about my blog, only that I will post interesting documents and pictures as I sort through them. There probably won’t be any rambling posts from me, like this one. I’m sure you’re all going to miss that a lot, HA! Who knows though, I might just be too busy cuddling and taking pictures of those babies!

Working Hard Behind the Scenes!

I have been working behind the scenes on my category problem. The only reason I’m not going very fast on that one, is I don’t want to have any broken links. I think I’m doing okay there, but if you find any, please let me know and I will try to fix them.

This graphic shows what my category goals are for the blog. I’m hopefully going down from 81 categories to 5! That’s a big leap. Any posts you want to find dealing with a specific family should be able to be found using the tags in the sidebar of the page. Eventually, I’m going to have a wonderful sitemap to point everyone where they need to go. I have to get organized first though! 🙂

If you have any advice for a genealogist on travel, be sure to let me know some tips and tricks!

I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season! Time seems to be moving so quickly, I’m sure that in no time it will be New Year’s Eve.

You are probably wondering what I mean by format changes. Though my blogging has been sporadic over the last couple of years, you might have noticed recently I started to make a small change to my posts.

Continue reading “Format Changes” →