Before You Plow On

If you have been fortunate to locate new information on a family–particularly new names, dates, and locations: stop.

• Take time to organize the information.
• Cite the sources.
• Put it in your genealogical database.
• Then continue on your research.

Otherwise “the stack” just gets bigger to the point where you don’t know what you have and what you don’t and your research starts to go in circles.

It can be exciting to locate new information. It can be boring to organize it and put it into your computer. But it can be frustrating to be stymied in your research later because you refused to organize anything you found.