Thomas MacEntee over at GeneaBloggers started a new meme today. This is meant to help everyone know what kind of technologies are out there to aid in Genealogy research. Here’s my list.

It’s been so busy around here this week. My Aunts and their husbands visited for the first time in like 30 years this weekend. So we were busy cooking, catching up, cooking, and revisiting some old haunts. It was definitely a great visit. I’m getting much better at prying information from people. Don’t worry, there was no harm done, but sometimes you just have to steer that conversation back around to why Grandpa’s family practically disowned him. It’s just vital to my getting to sleep at night. Many things my Aunt told me, she said if I ever published before she died, she’d haunt me forever. Yikes!

We definitely have a project we’re working on though. Our own family cookbook. We have a very basic binder in the shed we can use. Everyone is going to send me some recipes for it. The ones that don’t, well I’ll just bug them until they do. The idea came about when I was showing them the Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Cookbook that I wrote about earlier. Both of them loved it so much they immediately had me order them both a copy. They should have them by next week, if not the end of this week. So that’s something we’ll be working on, and we hope to finish putting at least a first copy together by Christmas. We’ll see how things go!

Unfortunately, because my Ohio Aunts were coming, I had to miss my annual New York Moore Reunion. My dad and siblings went, but I stayed in Maryland to help Mom with the company. I don’t regret it! I did miss not seeing everyone but I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot of family stories when everyone was cutting loose. Now all I have to do is log them in One Note before I forget all the who, what, when, wheres.

I’ll keep everyone informed about how the Recipe book is coming!

I’m still chugging along on my website. Right now I’m putting up my sources on the Doremus family. Re-visiting this family reminds me of some of my old contacts. These were made between me, my mother, and Aunt Diane many many moons ago. Mom and I were using email addresses provided by our Internet Provider at the time. Then they folded up pretty quickly and we switched to cable internet. After that I took a break from my genealogy as I was going to college and working full time. I’ve lost contact with many of these people. It makes me sad to think about that as it’s my Dad’s side of the family that these contacts were made from.

Going through RootsWeb, I actually ran across some emails that were exchanged all those years ago. July 7, 2002 to be exact. Gosh I’m jealous of other people’s organization and thought for sources at the time. I still remember where I got most things but I didn’t source at the time, keeping everything in my own memory. That was so bad of me. I’m regretting it now. I know it’s a common mistake by new researchers. I just beat myself up about it though. More and more as I go through this clean up process now.

Going into my Local Family History Center just really put it all into perspective for me. Did I find anything out new? Not really. I did realize I have to stop taking such a casual stance on everything. I need to keep a research diary, I need to log my correspondence, not just stick it in a genealogy folder after I’ve responded. Have I even responded to some of those? I don’t know because I’m not organized!

So this post is a shout out to all you organized, experienced researchers who are such an inspiration to beginners like me. I’m not a complete beginner sure, but in many ways I still am and always will be. I love the learning process so much, and I appreciate all that I’ve learned in just the short time I’ve been blogging. Now I just need to overcome my social anxiety and comment on the blogs I’m reading and let those who are inspiring me know!

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