Closing Out the Year

As the year winds down, I like to reflect on what I've accomplished over the past year genealogically. I usually have more control over my family research than any other part of my life.

One of my goals over the past two years was to integrate all the census records I've found over the years and either scan them or find the images online and save and link them to the proper families in my database. That backlog was finally cleared up in early November. It was a huge undertaking, and I am glad it is done. Er, maybe should do something about the forty new ones I've dumped saved in my census folder. I ended 2008 with 8011 images and I am close to 12000 now.

Another of my goals was to make sure I had every vital record in my possession scanned and linked. That project is complete.  Except for the nineteen death certficates I found this week.

Third, my genealogical program allows me to keep a To-Do list. I use this a lot. Mostly I use it to track for death certificates and for research facilities, such as the Allen County Public Library or the Lexington, Kentucky Public library.  Both these facilities are terrific and I usually have pages of research to do when I get a chance to visit either.  This year I was able to knock well over a hundred items off my lists.  Unfortunately, once I got home from these research trips, I added quite a few more items to the list.

I also have tried to keep my office organized. It is literally about the size of a narrow walk in closet, as the Wild Ones can attest. For the most part, I've kept it pretty neat, but it still needs work. Part of the problem is that my desktop is so small. And it fills up fast. Lateral surfaces tend to collect whatever I am working on.

Finally, I've tried to stay organized by actually filing stuff away. With the system I worked out when we moved in June of 2008, I've been able to actually find stuff I filed.

You never know what the year will bring, so even the smallest accomplishment should be celebrated. I hope you all have a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Distractions

Are you as easily distracted as I am? Sometimes it is a good thing and sometimes it is just, well, distracting.

Yesterday I was attempting to search for a Charles Isham in New York, born about 1824 and died before 1909. I was able to find him on the 1900 Census in Schoharie county, New York, which is where I expected him to be. Only the indexer (for Ancestry) has him listed as Charles QEHERU. 

Has anyone actually ever done indexing for Ancestry? Rumor has it they are using people from other countries. Other rumors are that they are using OCR (optical character recognition.) Personally, I think trained chimps could do a better job on indexing.

Oh, but I am getting distracted, again.  What I meant to say is that after finding Charles & his wife, Mary on the 1900 census, I went to the Old Fulton Postcards site to search for Charles Isham. I found lots of hits, but they weren't the right Charles Isham. I kept getting hits for Mary Lincoln and her husband Charles Isham. Lots of hits. This is Mary Lincoln, granddaughter of Abe and oldest daughter of Robert Lincoln. Normally, I would just ignore these hits, but since I have a connection to the Lincolns, I retrieved Mary Lincoln Isham's obituary and the announcement of their marriage. If you've ever had occasion to search for newspaper articles on this site, you will know that it can take a while for the site to display the search results.  When this happens, I try to open another tab in Internet Explorer and check out the genweb page or any other site that pops to mind to narrow down the search parameters.  Often I get distracted there too!

Now I think I should further distract myself and go hunting for Charles Isham, husband of Mary Lincoln, to see if I can find an obituary for him, since he predeceased her.

What was I working on again?

The Beauty of Review

As I previously blogged, I am reviewing some information given to me thirteen years ago by another Percival researcher. I briefly looked at this information when I received it, and then promptly re-entered the job market. For the next ten years, I still worked on my family history, but this particular document sat as I worked on other family lines and even did research for other people. At the end of those ten years, which were spent as a library clerk in Michigan, DH and I set to work to prepare our house for sale, as our retirement goal was to get the hell heck out of Michigan. During those ten years, I accumulated a mass of information, such as census, excerpts from books, photographs, and those family histories shared with me by others. Unfortunately, any paper that was not already filed was relegated to a box.

By the time our house was placed on the market I had several boxes stacked in the closet in my office. Their next location was the garage of the rented condo here in Tennessee. Finally, they made it to our newly constructed house.

It soon became apparent that my 6 x 10 office was in need of more storage. I added a four drawer legal size cabinet to my existing 4 drawer letter size and a two drawer furniture style lateral cabinet. Once we made our move from condo to house, I began sorting through all the census records I had accumulated. One of my goals was to link an image of every census record I owned to the family which it belonged. That was a long and tedious process, and actually began my review of what I had and what was missing for each family.

Then, having set up my filing system, I got to work.  It's been over a year and a half since I started the census project, which is now complete. Having moved on to other research, I was ready to review again, hence the current review project.

The real beauty of this review, now 13 years later, is that so much more is available online  than it was when I first found the internet. While nothing beats researching on site in a courthouse or a cemetery, having access to census, vital records, cemetery records and county histories online is such a true bonus. It makes the subscriptions to Ancestry and Genealogy Bank so worthwhile.