Winter 2010 GeneaBloggers Games – Game Plan

Carrying the flag for Greta’s Genealogy Bog in the 2010 GeneaBloggers Games is Humble Researcher. For any success she may achieve in the Games, HR credits the highly skilled and hardworking coaches of the GeneaBlogging community, led by Head Coach Thomas Macentee of Geneabloggers.


The flag carried by HR represents the United States, where she lives, the United Kingdom, where many of her ancestors originated, and Georgia, a country whose language she enthusiastically studies.

HR is a relatively junior athlete in these Games. Although she has a couple of documented strengths, in other areas she is either unproven or known to have weaknesses. She is not expected to be a top finisher, but we believe she will make a respectable showing and gain valuable experience in her first GeneaBloggers Games!

1. Go Back and Cite Your Sources!

Goal – Platinum medal
Athlete rating – Not a top contender, but not too bad for a newcomer

HR has been doing this one fairly consistently in her Reunion genealogy database and will continue it with her current research, so it should be fairly easy to reach 50 citations. She states that she will go back to her earliest entries to make sure she sourced all of them, and since she occasionally uses a “shorthand” source citation form in the program, she will create a file with the citation numbers that contains a proper, fully expanded citation for those sources.

2. Back Up Your Data!

Goal – Bronze medal (Outside possibility – gold)
Athlete rating – Flabby

This is HR’s weak point and the area of her most modest ambitions; in these Games she says that she is “only going to put her toe into the water. “ She has done one recent backup of all digital data and has most of her loose pictures in waterproof containers. A major scanning effort awaits the purchase of a high-quality scanner. She will write up a backup plan, publish it on the blog, and ask for recommendations and suggestions on accomplishing the goals of the plan and improving it.

3. Organize Your Research!

Goal – Diamond medal (Outside possibility – Platinum)
Athlete rating – A strong contender; rarely the leader of the pack, but usually among the leading pack

Most of her genealogy books, binders, hardcopy files, and digital files are fairly well organized and are kept together in a single location (hardcopy photos being the major exception). However, she has a few odd files, notes, and pieces of paper here and there, there is always more organization to be done on digital photos, and she can add some metadata to her digital files (and a few of those digital files are still “loose” on her computer desktop). Be careful not to let those little stray pieces trip you up, HR!

4. Expand Your Knowledge

Goal – Gold medal (Outside possibility – Platinum)
Athlete rating – An unknown, no known racing record, but could be a dark horse

Given enough time, she could probably achieve a platinum in this category, but she has admitted that she needs to be realistic. She has used Google maps but has not yet tried to post a map on her blog. She has created a timeline for an ancestor, but has not yet tried any of the timeline applications. One thing that she claims she would really like to do is create one or more memorial pages on Footnote, so this will be an incentive to do so. She also loves to read the tutorial pages on various genealogy sites, so this will be an enjoyable task. Known failure: She has created a Wordle, but did not succeed in saving and posting it (though a different application did work for her). So … it will be interesting to see what success she has with this category.

5. White, Write, Write!

Goal – Platinum medal
Athlete rating – Has kept in shape, strong hopes

This is one area where HR has kept in training. According to HR: “Whoodathunkit? A year or so ago, I would have thought that regularly writing and posting would be one of the least likely things for me to accomplish, but in the supportive atmosphere of the GeneaBlogging community, that assumption has been turned on its head. I had already planned to do several of these tasks; possible difficulty – prepublishing posts.” We’ll see!

6. Reach Out and Perform Genealogical Acts of Kindness!

Goal – Gold (Outside possibility – Diamond)
Athlete rating – Has experience in some areas, but this is a multiple-skill (decathlon/pentathlon) event, so best hopes are to place

She has some practice in the “following” blogs part, but is inexperienced in some of the other areas. Joining another genealogy society was already in her plans for this year, so this should give her a start.

That wraps up our “Up Close and Personal Interview: Humble Researcher’s Game Plan” here in Virginia.

Let the games begin!