I didn’t do such a great job of keeping up with the 52 Ancestors challenge, but I did make it more than halfway through the year. (Things got a little bit crazy in August once classes began at the university where I teach and life got busier.)
I wouldn’t exactly call it a failure but it wasn’t a great success either since I only manage 30 weeks of posting.
I will be continuing with the 2015 challenge based on themes. Perhaps this time I’ll make it past the 30-week mark.
And, as a good exercise for follow-through in the coming year, I’m setting some goals to keep myself on track with my genealogy research. Here they are:
- Attend the National Genealogical Society conference in St. Charles in May.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be in over my head if I go to some of these sessions, but I’m a member and it’s unlikely that the meeting will be this close to me for some time to come. The timing isn’t great for my work and personal life (it’s really busy around her in May with the end of a college semester when you’re teaching) but I’m going to get creative and see if I can’t make it work.
- Finish my First Families application on Jonah Clymer. (I’ve been working on this for about a year now, and while I don’t know everything I want to, I think I have enough to see this classification from the Missouri State Genealogical Association.)
- Take some of the free online courses through the National Genealogy Society.
There’s probably a lot of information here that I need to review and would find useful to my searching for records and documents.
- Continue to add information to the Powers family tree for my husband’s side of the family.
When I hit a roadblock in my own family tree ( and there are plenty of them) I often do a little digging on another tree just to give me something fresh to look at.
- Trace the Johnston line of my family tree and see what other information I find on Carl Johnston and his wife, Grace, who I believe are the parents of my paternal grandfather.
These are only a few of the many things I need to accomplish in my research for the coming year, but I think they’ll be challenging enough and still attainable. And, I can set new goals as the year progresses.
Getting started in genealogy 