Plans for 2015
As 2014 quickly draws to a close, I am looking back on what I’ve accomplished, what remains on the to-do list, and drawing up plans for the coming year.
I was, unfortunately, unable to finish my goals for the end of 2014, though I did come close in many respects. I have about 30 gravestones left to pull out of my media files and re-enter as sources, something I was hoping to have finished as the year closed. And I am still, two months on, waiting for my copy of Evidence Explained to arrive. I don’t believe it to be a problem with the seller, but rather that it got bogged down in the Christmas delivery chaos — media mail isn’t exactly the quickest thing to travel across an ocean, though I did expect it to arrive before now. The long and the short of it is that I was not able to clean up my source citations as I had really hoped to do.
But we must go on…
I do have some lofty goals for 2015.
I’m participating in 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks, a blogging prompt created by Amy Johnson Crow of the blog No Story too Small. I am doing this mainly as a challenge to blog on at least a weekly basis, and I’ll be telling stories of people from both my family and my husband’s family. I won’t be strictly posting about ancestors, though. There will be collateral lines in there as well since I enjoy researching families. I found group research to be highly beneficial, and I have a soft spot for end-of-line research – sometimes it is the people who never married who had the most interesting stories and are unfortunately forgotten.
I’d like to focus my research on the Canadian lines of our family as I want to try to take all the lines back to immigration, but more importantly to track down where they emigrated from, especially all of my husband’s pesky Irish folk who apparently couldn’t be bothered to write anything more precise than “Ireland” on any given form or document. Unfortunately, this eliminates a great deal of my family including all of my maternal side, and most of my paternal side. This may mean that I stray from time to time in order to fulfil goal 1… not to mention the fact that I really enjoy English research.
In tandem with goal number 2 and some new information in hand, I’m planning on researching my husband’s biological paternal lines which to this point has been a big blank expanse on our family charts. I’m also hoping they were better at writing down their Irish counties on documents.
There are also a few little tweaks I’d like to add to the blog, most notably ahnentafel pages for both our families, which is the easier option at this point. I’d love to have pedigree charts with interactive pop-ups, but we’ll cross that bridge at some later point in time.
Maybe my copy of Evidence Explained will even arrive before the end of 2015.
Copyright ©2014, Chriss Coleman