You make a discovery. A relative sends you a cache of record copies. You finally get a copy of that elusive relative’s pension file.
And then it happens: life.
When you return to your genealogy research, do you go back to those things you were working on when life interrupted? Or do you start on new projects? What un-utilized discoveries are sitting in your files?
I received copies of the entire military pension file for an uncle who served in the Civil War from Missouri. It contained several good nuggets of information that I started to organize. Then life happened several times and apparently when I returned to my research, I had forgotten all about the pension file. I picked up my research with another family and only re-discovered the files while looking for something else.
Do you keep a list of your current projects so that you know what you were working on when life happened?
Because it will.
3 Responses
This happens to me all the time and though I’ve started a document to pique my memory there must be a better way. I’d love to hear how others keep track of where they left off in research, especially when working on my threads.
Oh my goodness, this is me to a tee. Like Carol, I’d like to hear how others deal with this. Thanks for confessing this, Michael.
I mainly use the FamilySearch Family Tree with a backup I can manually synchronize to Ancestral Quest, a stand alone program installed on my computer. Not only do I have the history list on FamilySearch, containing about the last 50 people I have worked on, AQ allows me to create tags for each person so I can know what I have accomplished at a glance at the list of my data base. AQ also allows me to choose to open the program to the last person I worked on. (I think RootsMagic & Legacy can do similar things and probably other programs as well, but these are the three I know of which also synchronize data to FamilySearch)