2019 Genealogy Goals - Update

The George Robert Smith Family - December 25, 1914

A few genealogy bloggers that I follow have been using the halfway mark of 2019 to take a look at their progress. I'm a bit late this time but thought it would be a good idea for me, too.

DAR Membership - I'm still waiting for my mother to take a good look through her records so that I can complete the first three generations of documentation and then really get going on my application. She had some unexpected medical procedures in May and June but is doing very well now. I'm surprised by this, but she is pretty sure that she does not have death certificates for my grandparents so I've started the process of ordering them. They will be coming from the provinces of Quebec and Ontario in Canada and I have a feeling that the one from Quebec may take a while but I am hopeful that we can use that time to get everything else together.

As for earlier generations, I was hoping to get to the NYC Municipal Archives and the Brooklyn Historical Society this month, but I'm going to have to wait at least until the current heatwave passes before I spend hours on public transportation. I did discover another Brooklyn newspaper on newspapers.com, The Brooklyn Evening Star, that I was able to access through the Brooklyn Historical Society website. In this newspaper, I found a third marriage notice for my 2nd great-grandparents (I had found others in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and The Long Island Farmer newspapers) and although I didn't learn anything new, I was happy to see that all of the names were spelled correctly. Just going through the process of searching got the wheels turning in my head about this family again and led to a few new ideas for research which I hope to investigate soon.

Sharing My Research - I was able to complete five generations on my new public tree on Ancestry before my membership ran out in May. I took advantage of a sale at My Heritage for an annual membership, but I've been a bit frustrated by the way their site works. I may go into more detail on that in another post, but I'll keep working on it for a while before I put my frustrations out there publicly.

Passenger Lists - I've put this on the back burner until I'm ready to really dive into Swedish records. I want to find the date that the church says my great-grandmother and her sister and friend left to give me another date range to search in the records. This likely won't happen in 2019.

Self-Education - I really need to make this more of a priority! Enough said.

Research Trip - We went to Ottawa in May and had a great trip. I even learned about two more Revolutionary War ancestors for further research.

Giving Back - I have posted a new memorial transcription for the Honor Roll Project every month and I have posts ready to go for August, September, and October. I have also photographed enough memorials to transcribe and post monthly through April or May of next year.  Unfortunately, I have not done any indexing on Family Search in months. I'm putting this on my calendar now for next week!

Preservation and Scanning - I am almost finished the rescanning of my grandfather's photo albums, creating an index of the images in Excel and uploading the images to Dropbox to share with the Eastern Townships Resource Centre in Quebec and my cousins. This has been a pretty big project, interrupted for a few months by a shoulder injury. I love these photos, one of which is at the top of my post, and looking at them all again has given me a lot to wonder about but the actual work of scanning, indexing and uploading can get pretty tedious and I am ready to be finished with this project!

Where I Stand - Obviously my DAR application is going more slowly than I had hoped but plugging away is the nature of genealogical research and I will just keep doing what I can.

As for my other goals, once I'm completely finished with my scanning project, I will have more time for them, especially education. I hate to abandon, even temporarily, my search for my great-grandmother Johnson on passenger lists, but leaving it until I can be more focused is best.

I think of my goals often and try not to get spend too much time on anything that isn't on this list, but it's good to do a more formal review once in a while. And writing this post has already made me think about what I might accomplish in 2020 but that would be really getting ahead of myself!