So, I went “on the clock” (for BCG certification) in December 2012. In the meantime a lot of “life” has happened but a lot of “life” is going to happen when you take a step like this. I’m the type of person who needs a deadline, so I went on the clock. Once I sat down and tried to locate a family/problem for my case study, I got concerned. One look at my office, my binders, my computer files, told me that I was horribly unorganized and I needed to do a lot of catching up, fixing, data entry (I have a thumb drive with scans from Salt Lake City from 2009 that I haven’t worked with yet!) and organizing, before I could even make an educated guess on the case study.
Well, in the last week, I went through a very large pile of notes with “to-do” items on them, some dating back to 2003. They said things like “find tombstone for …” or “locate obit for …” or one sticky note “I am not convinced that ––– is really –––’s father.” (Names being left out in case this REALLY is my case study.) That one sticky note sent me on a swirl of reviewing documents, notes, computer files, quick look-ups on Ancestry and FamilySearch. I MAY just have found my case study. I have a few pieces of indirect evidence but nothing conclusive that says who the parents of my subject are.
This project is so counter-intuitive for the genealogist. If you’ve never reviewed the Case Study requirements for the BCG portfolio, it basically requires that you use the genealogical proof standard to solve a problem of conflicting evidence or by using of indirect evidence. I know that I have many of these in my family research, but finding a good one can be challenging. And then, what happens when you start to work hard on it and then find that piece of direct evidence? … ah … back to square one.
I did get through my pile of to-dos and either figured out that they had been done (recycled), or if they were easy to do (just did it), or they went into my Evernote to-do list (then recycled). Now, on to some research! So pray for my project, that I find no direct evidence on this man’s parentage and instead am able to locate a lot of really good indirect evidence!
Genealogy Pants 
Sorry, but I am happy to hear that there is someone besides me who has all those files of scans from SLC from years past. I always, at least I hope it was always, uploaded the file from the thumb drive into my dropbox each evening. I do have lots of folders still in my dropbox with titles like “SLC 2009” and then the subfile with the film number for the images. There is a panic every once in a while when I plug in an old thumb drive and find a file like that, but so far they have always been already copied onto the computer. Those small drives are just so easy to lose! At NGS last week I heard over and over again of the need to analyze, scource and correctly save each and every piece of information immediately . It just seems so hard to do that in the limited repository time that you have when you don’t live there, but who knows how many rabbit trails have been followed because of not following this best practice.
Exactly Judy! I have the same named files and same dilemma when I’m at a repository. I don’t want to spend the time doing it right then and am generally exhausted when I get to my room at night! Thanks for reading and best of luck to you!
So, now I don’t feel so bad for neglecting my RootsTech 2013 files! Thanks!
Oh no, you still have time before they are officially considered a “pile”!