My New Year’s Genealogy Research and Blogging Resolutions

Carnival of Genealogy, 63rd Edition: What plans do you have for your genealogy research next year? How about for your blogging? No groaning or whining now. Write 'em up and let us know!


I wanted to have some sort of exciting goal or resolution for next year, but as I reviewed my research this year, it became apparent that I had been a bad girl, Dear Genea-Santa – oh, wait, wrong Carnival. There was too much collection and not enough assimilation of the collected materials. Therefore, my number one genealogy-related resolution – boring and pathetic as it is – is to TRANSCRIBE MORE MATERIALS. If I made a list of all the documents I need to transcribe and if I had any verse-writing talent at all (that’s an awfully big “if”), I could probably produce a list that could be sung to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”: 300 newspaper articles, a dozen Civil War service records, two Confederate Pension applications, 50+ obituaries, and hundreds of death certificates. (Not to mention a few birth certificates, marriage licenses, funeral cards, and letters.) A serious dent needs to be put in this pile before I add anything to it (and being the packrat that most genealogists are, I am of course contemplating doing just that in the near future). The exciting “search” part of genealogy needs to be balanced by the tedious “housekeeping” part. Of course, there’s nothing that says I won’t discover something important and exciting in the course of scanning, organizing, and transcribing materials. So I’ll get to it – on January 2nd, 2009.

My blogging resolution? To become more technically proficient at blogging. On a scale of 0 to 10, I’m probably at 0+ right now. However, with the help of sites such as the Facebook Bootcamp for Genea-Bloggers (see link at left), I’m getting better bit by bit, although the different ways for following blogs and getting feeds have me a bit dazed. So any efforts to educate me are welcome: Just what exactly do all those widgets and feeds do?

Blogging/Genealogy Resolution added at a late date:

I usually refrain from making overly ambitious resolutions, so I am not going to make one of the big genealogy resolutions – writing down the story of my life for my own descendants. That’s just too large an undertaking. However, I can cut that resolution down to size: I resolve to do the job in small bites, a memory at a time. To that end I am going to aim at committing one memory a week to paper and if I succeed in doing that, it will show up on the blog for “Memory Monday.”