Cite Your Work!

Yea, yea, yea...I teach how to cite your sources all day long, but I have been caught not heeding my own advice! When I first started my genealogy hobby 13 years ago, I didn't bother citing where I got my information from because I never planned on publishing my findings and it was just "for fun!" Well, do I ever regret that decision! I still probably won't publish anything, but if only I knew where I got all of my information from so that I could verify it! I have met many distant relatives and shared information with many people and often I find discrepencies in our data. If only I knew exactly where I got that specific date in question (or city, or name, etc) then I could go back and check my work. Now I am in the process of citing all of the information that I have copies of, emails that I printed, books that I purchased, and it is painful, but productive!

I went to my friend, Georgia's, last Friday and got her started in Legacy Family Tree software and CLOOZ organizing software and yes, she is citing her sources because of my lessons learned! We will plan a trip to the Library of Congress library or the DAR library for my day off in September or October. That should be fun!

Still no headway on my "things to do list", but I am ever so hopeful....

Turning Over a New Leaf

Okay, it is August 5th and not January 1st, but today is a NEW day! I decided to begin my first blog to keep in touch with family and friends and to keep me on track with all my "little" projects! If I post online what I intend to do, maybe someone will help keep me honest and I will actually see some projects to completion! I don't know if family genealogy research can ever be complete, but these stacks and stacks of paper piled on my desk have got to get put SOMEWHERE!

My things to do list:

1. Send Holzause Civil War Pension records to people who inquired about them (a long time ago). They are already in envelopes...just need to be posted.
2. Complete Family Trees for Jerry and me. I purchased nice, large ones with room for photos. I just need to print out the information and make thumbnails of the photos that I have.
3. Add my sister-in-law's family (Batot) to Legacy. I scanned a ton of photos and records last summer (2007), but never did anything with the information!
4. Finish adding records to Legacy and then download the file to Clooz.
5. Add documents to Clooz.
6. Find the McAllister family in Boston, circa 1900
7. Find the Holzhaus family in Ohio, circa 1850's

Well, I could go on and on, but let's stop here!