Sunday, September 16, 2012

Getting The Family Involved

A couple of weeks ago, one of my sons and his girlfriend decided to both work on some genealogy for their respective families. This led to my son asking me for some info that I couldn't put my finger on right away, as it had been awhile since I looked at the family line he was interested in. My son managed on his own to find a whole new surname in that family, the Branscome name in Virginia, which I am excited to work on with him! Around the same time, we cleaned out the basement storage room where my genealogy file cabinet is. I decided now was a good time to go through those dusty old pre-digital era folders and see what research notes I had in it. Some had never made it to my PAF and Roots Magic programs at all, other folders had only outdated beginnings of research that I now have much more details on. My project for this fall is to go through all of the folders in that file cabinet, see that all the data is entered into my online programs, upload an up to date Gedcom file to the new Family Tree at the LDS www.familysearch.org website, and see if I can start to connect some of my surname lines that 15 years ago were dead ends before I used the internet to connect with cousins and other researchers. Moral of the story? Get the family involved in your research! Thank you, Nathan, for getting me back in the saddle of organizing. It doesn't do much good if you can't find the data you need when you want it.