My oft-promised (or oft-threatened, if you prefer) statement that I’ll pick up in blogging may soon become reality. It’s cliche, but the past few months have been packed. I haven’t posted while I look for a direction to go. I hope that’s about to change.
I’ve been interested in genealogy since I was young. I watched my father review the records he had, and I asked and learned what I knew from him. The Internet has made it much easier to post and share information online. I’ve been lucky to grasp this in a way that can be applied to genealogy, and I’ve continued to learn and grow as a result. I’ve taken what I’ve found back home to share with family – and now I do the same with my wife and other friends and colleagues.
I expect this blog will continue to carry a share – a growing share – of genealogy posts. But I’m about to get some other topics to delve into.
The past few months have been filled with research, analysis, and observation. It’s also set me down several new courses in life. I’ll have plenty to share as I publish what I’ve learned – and, hopefully, learn from what I publish.
A recent death in my wife’s family sent me searching through files of genealogy. That reminded my of an unfinished project with those files. Half of her records are digital scans and the other half are photocopies. Some items are copies of relatives’ files and others are borrowed materials – things people will come inquiring about at some point.
I’ve tracked the items I hold and those I’m looking for in a spreadsheet. It functions like a checklist. When I find a census record, I delete from one spreadsheet and add it to the other. It lets me keep a running list of what I have on each person and what I need to find. It also lets me keep a list of all documents – I can quickly find all the birth records or grave locations that I’ve recorded.
This works, but I’m sure there are other, better ways to track what I have. I recently found this post about journals, logs, and calendars. Question for genealogists out there: what do you use to track the documents you’ve located. I’m not inquiring about different forms of ancestry charts necessarily – just different ways of keeping your “to-find” and “found” lists.
My family has researched a lot of our ancestry during the past few years. I’ve worked on a project to record, photograph, and map the graves of ancestors. My parents have been a big help with this, and they’ve driven many miles of Ohio and Indiana roads with their GPS to get the exact locations of graves.
My parents visited two more cemeteries in the Cincinnati area about a month ago. With the information they collected there, I’ve updated the map, which is included in this post. (If the plugin doesn’t work properly, try to view the map here.)
View
Clarkspot Ancestor Graves in a larger map
For more information on my family’s history, visit my genealogy section.
Just wanted to take minute to clarify this post from earlier this week.
I think social networking is a wonderful and entertaining tool to get in closer contact with people. I’ve personally learned about so many people who now have children, homes, and spouses that I wouldn’t have known about before – people who I had lost touch with years ago. I’m really happy for them, and it’s great to get that chance to catch up with people who had inadvertently fallen from my list of colleagues.
Just as I can get more done with a word processor than hand writing everything, I expect programs can help me know a bit more about a larger number of people. But I don’t think I’ll truly know hundreds of people – I think I’ll have trivia about most of their lives.
The larger point behind that entry is that social networking is an interest for some people in the same way that I have a passionate interest in genealogy. Some folks will be really connected and plugged in to the newest sites. They’ll move on when too many other people join the site and it loses its hipness. And if they’re not coming back, were they truly engaged with – and listening to – your message? Or were you just playing in the right medium for a few months?
It’s a question for a communications professional who believes social networking is The Solution. It might only be one tool to get one segment of people. It’s a service – not a strategy.
