SLOWLY RESEARCHING, ORGANIZING, AND DOWNSIZING THE GENEALOGY MESS

 Life has tended to be more than a bit busy and crazy the last few months at my home.  I noticed today that I have not posted here for about two months. Shame on me!

However, I have been slowly researching, organizing and downsizing the genealogy mess of papers and photos in my genealogy world.

In a perfect world, I would work a few minutes on some part of genealogy every single day.  My world is far from perfect, and the last couple years I tend to work in blocks of time rather than a few minutes a day. 

However, since my last post:

• I have gone thru boxes of semi-organized boxes of photos, and pulled out many that had more to do with other family members than me.  Some I scanned into the computer and labeled right then.

• Many of the pulled out photos were sent to family members or their children for them to enjoy (or not).  I do not need every single photo that has been given to me over the years by other relatives. Or I have taken over the years. It is worth the postage to be able to downsize those boxes a little.

• Then there are the documents, and copies of those same documents.  Extra copies were bundled together by person into old recycled manila folders and two boxes of them were sent to the Allen County Public Library in Ft. Wayne, IN.  Why there?  It is closer to me than either Lancaster, PA or Salt Lake City, UT and it is currently rated the second genealogy library in the USA after the LDS library in Salt Lake City.

• I have written a quarterly article for Mennonite Family History Magazine.

• The computer files are my current priority to organize.  I am finding the same documents and photos in several places on my computer.  I don't have a clear idea how this happened, except that at one time my wonderful hubby was trying to help and he scanned in tons of papers for me into one giant file. The same with photos. It was super sweet of him to do, but now I have to read each paper and put it in the correct file. Repeat with photos.

• I have not been working on my family tree that is on Family Search.  My frustration with it was over the top a couple years ago when someone added several totally wrong people to the tree, and it took me weeks to get them removed. I have been thinking about slowly deleting it just to avoid future frustration. Imagine my surprise when I got on there last month to see what kind of mess there was  and several other folks had actually added people that I had researched but not put on there.  Yippee!

• I have been able to attend several virtual genealogy classes over the past year, and most have been very helpful in my research or in the organizing side.  However, I do work full time and this very impolitely intrudes on my time for genealogy. I also have family, volunteer, and church commitments. I am a good time manager, but there are still only 24 hours in any given day.

• My goal for this summer is simply to get rid of the extras in my genealogy world so that I can concentrate on the lines that are actually mine.  I love family groups, but I do not have to research each line of those.  I seem to get distracted in cluster research and work far longer on those lines than needed.

• As all of you family historians know, research and organization take time - lots of it.  

• As I said when I started this blog, I have lots and lots of stuff to go on here so please continue to be patient with me.  Blogging is a lot of work, and my goal is to share what I have with other people who are interested in any of these lines.

Note: the clip art pictures are from Bing.com