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.

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3 Responses

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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)

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