When genealogist Thomas MacEntee mentioned his Genealogy Do-Over in January 2015, for genealogists, I got pretty excited. After 25 years of
doing research, I’m ready for a partial do-over, but not one in which I start
from scratch. With over 44,000 names in my database, I feel I wouldn't survive
the Genealogy Do-Over challenge, nor would my ancestors.
Without the internet for almost three weeks, I've had plenty of time to think
about where I want to go with my genealogy goals for 2015. During my downtime, I’ve been able to
accomplish things I've always put aside in order to spend time reading
Facebook, reading posts, and writing my own blog at Life From The Roots. Out of necessity, I had to find ways to
continue with my research and organizing.
So what have I been able to do?
I went through Xerox copies of
book pages taken at various libraries many years ago and entered the data on
my RootsMagic6 database. There are many more to do, and this will keep me busy
for many weeks. As I go along, I'll keep notes of what sources I need to locate online. This report and others done today are being done at my local library.
Located images of book pages I took at libraries on my iPad and transcribed them to my database. Taking photos of books with the iPad Air is incredibly easy, all pages are sharp and easy to read or if not quite so, I can enlarge each page.
A fun project was deleting over 13,000 photos from the 33,000 in my hard drive, thereby making it easier for me to locate images and photos for future posts. I hope this task will save me time during my future backup process. My current 20,000 are not in any particular order, everything is by date. As long as my brain's memory holds out, I think I'll be fine. But, yes I should have labeled and tagged everything.
I've merged duplicate sources into one. And, along this line, check for consistency. If I have the state abbreviation of MA it needs to be changed to Massachusetts, and county needs to be co. I recently changed all my Brome and Missisquoi counties in Quebec to read, Brome-Missisquoi Regional County Municipality, Quebec, Canada.
The last thing that’s kept me busy is reading several genealogy magazines and journals. Something I normally didn’t have time for.
Located images of book pages I took at libraries on my iPad and transcribed them to my database. Taking photos of books with the iPad Air is incredibly easy, all pages are sharp and easy to read or if not quite so, I can enlarge each page.
A fun project was deleting over 13,000 photos from the 33,000 in my hard drive, thereby making it easier for me to locate images and photos for future posts. I hope this task will save me time during my future backup process. My current 20,000 are not in any particular order, everything is by date. As long as my brain's memory holds out, I think I'll be fine. But, yes I should have labeled and tagged everything.
I've merged duplicate sources into one. And, along this line, check for consistency. If I have the state abbreviation of MA it needs to be changed to Massachusetts, and county needs to be co. I recently changed all my Brome and Missisquoi counties in Quebec to read, Brome-Missisquoi Regional County Municipality, Quebec, Canada.
The last thing that’s kept me busy is reading several genealogy magazines and journals. Something I normally didn’t have time for.
I've even thought about several major
projects I want to accomplish during the Do-Over time frame when the internet
is up and running again. My thinking about ideas for improvement flows freely. I love it!
