Five years ago, I posted the ongoing adventures of trying to get all my paper organized. At the time I thought I was going to do great! Well, five years later, I no longer use those crates, hanging file folders or even that blanket or bed frame. I guess it was a clean sweep!
Continue reading “My Current Digital Organization”Hello world, I am back again. Today I was watching a webinar given by Amy Johnson Crow on FamilyTreeWebinars.com. The webinar was very informative and a great refresher of somethings that I was already doing. While I was watching, it reminded me of something that happened about a year and a half ago. I was talking with my Aunt Lori over Thanksgiving, and it always turns to genealogy with us. My favorite thing to do is hand her records and let her look at them. About 90% of the time she notices something that I didn’t.
This particular Thanksgiving, we were talking about the progress I was making on the Redford/Travis section of the family tree. It had been a long time since I had anything new to report for them, so I was excited to share, even though it was more Travis than Redford.
We were discussing all the different Redfords that migrated to Los Angeles, and when they were there. I had mentioned that there was one Redford girl that had just plain disappeared on me and I couldn’t find information for her anywhere. I assumed that I would eventually find a death record for her in New Jersey from before the bulk of the family left for California.
It has been 659 days since my last real blog post. I had no plans to abandon my blog. Life sort of just happened to me. Shortly after my last blog post, one of my Aunts suddenly passed away. I didn’t know it at the time, or even until recently, but I believe I fell into a depression. I wasn’t diagnosed, I didn’t talk to anyone but my family about it, but I completely lost my passion for life for a long time. It’s only now that I’m starting to get back to doing things I love like genealogy, and hopefully soon quilting.
I have made a lot of changes over the time I’ve been away from the blog, including a switch over from Family Tree Maker to Legacy. This was long before the announcement recently about Family Tree Maker. My reason for switching was mainly because the program kept crashing and corrupting my file. I’d have to “clean” it up all over again after downloading the synced version from Ancestry. I haven’t regretted the change but as with all software changes this has come with a learning curve. Not to mention, again cleaning up the sources after the import process.
I don’t have plans to regularly post on the blog yet. Only because now that my computer situation is finally stable, I am cleaning up and organizing. I haven’t felt much like devoting that kind of time to that process in a long time but I’m finding it very helpful in getting my motivation back.
I hope everyone who is reading this is doing well and I hope to write again soon!
My website was down for about a week while it was moved to another server. I am fixing the broken images on the last few blog posts now. They should all work by tonight!
Even though my main focus is to clean up my source citations, every once and a while you just need to put in a little research time. So that’s what I do when I just need to do something fun with my genealogy.
This strategy has paid off for me because I managed to find William Travis and Sarah Booth’s marriage record! That means I’m back one more generation since it gives the father’s names.
Continue reading “William, Father of William”
Before my unintentional hiatus from the blog and genealogy, I was working on a little mystery. It was actually quite fun and I’m eager to pick up where I left off.
This weekend, I received a discount in my e-mail to come back to Ancestry.com and I decided to go ahead and use the discount to upgrade to the World Membership for at least the 6 month term of that discount. With my World Membership I can see the Canadian census images now which really excites me.
Continue reading “Mystery Monday: Bell Brodie Returns!”Hello from Southern Maryland. I’ve been working a lot lately on a bunch of different things having to do with my Family File. Most of those things involve cleaning up my sources mess.
I realized last night however, that I somehow, in the midst of all this confusion finished entering in my family lines for the Family File Cleanup Project that I began many years ago. How that snuck in on me, I have no idea.
So now I think is a good time to do a little planning on what comes next… after I clean up the sources again.
Well, I did it. I got through all my census citations. They’re all back to what they were before the computer switcheroo. Now I’m onto the other 80 sources that duplicated themselves in the merge.
You might have noticed that my new trend of posting on Fridays broke last week. That was because I had a tiny secret… I was on vacation! Well, not exactly yet but first thing last Saturday morning my mother, my sister and I all loaded up and headed to Ohio for some “family fun time”. Seriously that was our official term that my cousin Patty came up with.
It was technically a girls weekend and it was so much fun. We rented a cabin around Hocking Hills State Park. There was no internet, no cell phone service and it was heaven!
So there aren’t any blog posts this week again, but I have made progress and I’m still on target!
Last Friday, my goal was to cleanup the 1880 US Census source citations in my family file. I accomplished that and more! I ended up cleaning up 1880 US, 1881 England and Scotland, 1892 New York and 1895 Kansas and New Jersey. Granted those other ones are smaller amounts in my file but progress to me is progress.
Unlike last week, I think this week’s goal will have to be done bits at a time throughout the week. This week’s goal is the 1900 census.
