All genealogists have their top goals in mind. Trace their ancestors to the old country. Discover their great grandmother's maiden name. That's a given.
And I hope you've created your list of genealogy goals for the new year.
But now's a good time to create a rainy-day genealogy list. That's your list of leads you need to follow up on. It's those unexplored family relations you want to better understand. It's the mysteries you'd love to solve.
First, choose an obvious place to keep your list—a place where you won't overlook it, and you'll definitely see it a lot. How about the task list of your genealogy software? A notebook where you jot down facts as you find them? Or a text file on your computer desktop?
Next, look for breadcrumbs you've left for yourself in the past. For instance, ancestry.com has a shoebox feature. When I'm searching for an ancestor and see a document for someone interesting, I can put it in the shoebox for later.
Today I'm looking at a ship manifest in my shoebox for a woman named Giuseppa Sarracino who's married to Carmine Pastore. I have reason to believe she is the woman in a family photo given to me by my aunt. I've already found six babies born in Italy to a couple with the very same names.
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| Did I discover the woman on the right on a ship manifest? |
This Pastore-Sarracino family is going on my rainy-day genealogy list right now.
Your list will help keep you from forgetting these interesting tidbits. When the day comes that you're frustrated with the genealogy goal you're working on, your rainy-day list could be the fun distraction you need!
Where will you start looking for your forgotten genealogy leads? Besides my ancestry.com shoebox, I have handwritten notes in different notebooks. When I go through those notebooks, I'm sure I'll find other leads that need my attention.
When I first started researching my family history, all I had was the Ellis Island website. I began filling a notebook with every immigrant who had a last name I knew or came from an Italian town I knew. Some of them made it into my family tree, but others are waiting impatiently in that notebook.
What if some of them are my overlooked blood relatives?
It's a brutal January in New York state this year, and tons of other places. You're bound to have a snow day or two. Wouldn't you like to use a snow day to explore something on your rainy-day genealogy list?
I am an inveterate List Maker ... all on random scraps of paper ... until now. TRELLO! I saw a blog post on using Trello for genealogy. Set it up, and I am in heaven!!
ReplyDeleteYou can have 10 boards per workspace (but an unlimited number of workspaces) with the free account. Right now, I have 8 boards including one for genealogy, one for embroidery, one for digital/ household tasks, etc.
Each board can have an infinite number of lists ... where the list items are called *cards* ... think index cards! This is how my brain works!
So, there's a list for DNA, one for hubby's brick walls, mom's new half brother (who is so very awesome), ong for all Granny and Pa's descendants, and probably a good dozen more!
If you think in terms of bullet-pointed lists, this just might be the ticket for you, too!