New Year's Resolutions

To post in this blog more than every other month.
Yeah, I know, when I started I said I'd post every week, but that kind of fell apart in the lead up to Christmas, as my only day off each week became the day for running errands and getting organised.  So I resolve to post more often...but am not being specific about how often: resolutions are so much easier to keep when they're vague.

To tidy up my family tree.
I've been working on it since 1995 in a variety of software.  For the past 7 8 years (must remember that it's now 2011) I have been using The Master Genealogist, which I have found is far and away the best genealogy programme available.  Rather than locking me into a pre-set list of events and report types, it is infinitely customisable for those who want to tailor their software to fit their family history, although it does have standard events and reports for those who are getting started and not feeling adventurous just yet. 

On 27 September 2003 I experienced a hard drive crash which almost swallowed my family tree.  Most of it was recovered, but links between sources and events was not.  [start lecture]Any good researcher knows the value of clear, accurate sources -- it's not just for the sake of showing your work, it can also save time and money later when trying to remember how you reached your conclusions so you don't wind up duplicating efforts.[/end lecture]  I extracted the source and event tables and saved them as separate files, and can manually piece together which goes where, but it's time-consuming and dull, so there are parts of my family tree which have now been sourceless for 8 years.  Each year I manage to completely review another branch (sometimes two!), not only going through all my hard copy records (letters, books, legal documents, etc) but comparing the information to all the data now available on-line, and I usually wind up not only re-establishing the original sources, but also building on the tree.  I'd like to try to do this for the Camber and Goodey branches of my tree this year.

To respond to e-mail enquiries more quickly.
I receive a fair amount of genealogy-related e-mail -- nowhere near the amount that many do, particularly those who host local history and genealogy sites (I should know: I started the Manitoba Genweb site when I lived there and was flooded with requests for help), but I know that full answers often taken more time to prepare than I have available when I first receive the e-mail.  I've spent a good deal of this Christmas break replying to all the e-mail in my inbox, some of it dating back as far as last February, and am going to have to come up with a better way to respond more quickly so I don't always start letters with an apology for the delay.

To keep my focus on the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Most of my great-great-great-great-grandparents were born in the first two decades of the 1800s.  Once I start getting beyond them, records for most become scarce, or it becomes impossible to prove (or at least make a finding based on the balance of probabilities) who was who or when something happened.  I have a few branches who have left ample documentary evidence from the 18th century and before, but other than these few areas, I find I begin to lose any sense of connection to the people involved.  I can imagine their 19th century lives, likely because, in many cases, someone in the family a generation or two back wrote down their memoirs, including stories they'd heard from their grandparents, which often includes descriptions of the people who are now separated from me by 200 years.  The family tree expands so quickly with every generation removed from the present day: I want to focus my efforts on finding details of all my ancestors who were alive in 1800, regardless of how many generations they are removed from me, and then work my way forward down through all their descendants to the present day or as close as I can reasonably get.  Of course there will be those areas where it's easier (and tempting) to spend ages rummaging through royal genealogies (who isn't descended from Charlemagne?), but so many people have made careers of doing this -- why duplicate their work if I can't add anything new?

To spend more time with family.
The trouble with genealogy is that it can be isolating: it requires a lot of concentration and interruptions can cause me to lose a train of thought, leaving me irritable.  I have to keep reminding myself that the family tree will always be there, but my kids are still little and more interested in having my attention than in knowing that the strength of sources has been correctly assessed when attempting to identify their eleventh cousins.  How I'm going to balance this resolution with the others will be my big challenge.