Family History Month - It Has Come To A Close

Family History Month ends today ~ I hope you have enjoyed the 26 daily prompts (everything from A to Z) and that you actually did at least a few of them.  Since I am a big believer in following my own advice, here is a wrap-up of my response to a few of the prompts.

Acknowledge - Thanks to Vince, Meagan, Geraldine, Mary & Joel, & Jeri AND thanks to The Newfoundland Grand Banks' website volunteers and the Plate Cove Facebook page participants for pointing me in the right direction where the Irish/Newfoundland connection is concerned, and sharing your knowledge, enthusiasm and genealogy finds with me!

Backup - I backup twice a month - you should too!

Collaborate - Thanks to Janelle and Sherrie for helping me out with the Slovenian side of the family!

Engage - Thanks to Great Aunt Christine and my cousin Mary Christine for sharing lunch, as well as your memories and photographs with my mom and me this month ~ you provided lots of new information!

Index - I continue to work through the birth, marriage and death information I gathered during my research trips to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and the Provisional Archives in St. John's, Newfoundland.  The indexes are a work in progress ~ I am about 85% complete and hope to be finished by the end of the year!

Kin - My October 11, 2010 post was about my grandfather ~ I made sure to send an email to family members to encourage them to take a look at my Blog and also share their memories.

Locate - I went through my Master Locations List in my Legacy Family Tree program and updated and/or corrected all my addresses - 25 countries are represented and I have learned a great deal about the historical locations in Norway and Sweden during the past month.

Marriage Records - I have 1,586 marriages in my family file; of those 457 marriages do not have a marriage date!  I need to get busy in this department!

To Do Logs - I have made the commitment to record all my to-do items for the next 2 months and hopefully I will establish a pattern so that it becomes second nature to me.  I am using my Legacy Family Tree program for this task.

Webinar - I attended 3 webinars this past month:

• Evidence Analysis with Karen Clifford  
• Blogging for Beginners with DearMyrtle
• Sharing Genealogy Electronically with Geoff Rasmussen 

Each was helpful and provided some great tips (they are all still available online at the Legacy website for replay ~ check them out as well as a few others).  Best tip from the webinars came from Karen Clifford:

• determine a research question/issue
• make up a research plan
• research for three hours focusing on the issue, various resources, and possible findings
• write up your research report summarizing the question/issue, the plan, the resources, the results (positive and negative), and what further research is required

I think I will give that a try next month!

I hope you gained some insight, had some fun, found some new websites to check out, and noodled around with your family history!  Sláinte!