Love and Marriage – Getting a Good Wife

Genealogy Program, Marriage, , , ,
The Bismarck (North Dakota) Tri-Weekly Tribune, 2 April 1878
The Bismarck (North Dakota) Tri-Weekly Tribune, 2 April 1878
“Marriage is not about age; it’s about finding the right person.” Sophia Bush
(Read more at BrainyQuote.)
There’s nothing that says “love” like going to look for a good wife. There must have been a shortage of “good women” in North Dakota in 1878. Well, it wasn’t a state yet, but part of the Dakota Territory in 1878. Statehood for North Dakota occurred in 1889. The population was sparse (and continues to be) for the area. And I imagine there really was a lack of “good women.”
1880 Census, Dakota Territory
1880 Census, Dakota Territory
In the 1880 Dakota Territory census, Phillip W. Lewis is listed with his wife, Mary, and their son, John (age 1). And where are Phillip and Mary from? Virginia. I think Phillip found his good woman.

Love and Marriage and Death – An Introduction

Marriage, , ,

brideandgroomThey are the reason we are here. A man and a woman came together and made babies and from that day forward genealogists everywhere have been having a hey day putting the long forgotten family puzzles back together. Of course we all know that they didn’t have to be married for the baby to be made. However, some of my favorite obituaries concern couples who were married for a long time. I have also enjoyed finding newspaper clippings concerning marriages, finding love, courting, and the like. It makes the names and dates and the imaginings we all get about our ancestors a little more real, a little more fun, a little more like us.

This next series of posts will involve things having to with love, marriage, couples and unfortunately, the inevitable: death.

Reviving, Refreshing, Reviewing … And we’re back!

Research Trips, , , ,
This was NOT me in Salt Lake City.
This was NOT me in Salt Lake City.

I recently spent almost 2 weeks in Salt Lake City for research and to attend the APG PMC and SLIG. (Thanks Grandpa for being “mom” for me!) It was beautifully snowy the first week (along with slippery sidewalks and cold temps) and sunny but smoggy the second week. Basically I’m not a fan of winter in SLC when you are trying to get around outside. But it will not deter me from attending again next year! I’m pretty tough. I had such a great time just being surrounded by the topic that I love, with people who love the same boring (but not to us!) topic. I got to know the best people more closely. I don’t think I ever laughed so hard in my life. One night, I literally had a face-ache from laughing so much. (You know who you are.)

I am absolutely a huge fan of SLIG. It was my first time attending and I had an outstanding time. I think a large part of that was because of the friends I made and people I connected with beyond Facebook! I took the Advanced Practicum which is a different type of course. Everyday you get a new problem to work on, a case study that has been worked on and nearly completed by genealogists in the field, who then turn the problem over to the class with varying degrees of information to get us started. We then had 24 hours to work on the problem. We met everyday at 4pm to discuss our findings and get the next problem. I won’t go into the details of how it all worked, but the class was very interesting. I enjoyed seeing how others would go about solving the same problem, the different thought processes, and the sometimes different, sometimes same results.

After SLIG I needed about a week to readjust to life. I had gotten out of all of my routines and I was exhausted! Living out of a suitcase gets old after a while, even though I love to travel. I did very much enjoy coming down from my hotel room to a nice continental breakfast and giant pots of coffee everyday. I didn’t have to worry about that part of my day everyday. It’s back to making my own coffee and bed again. And back to the blog. I have a fun plan for February’s theme so I’ll “see” you here soon!

New Goals for 2014

Genealogical Goals, , ,

HappyNewYearAs we look ahead to the new year, we tend to plan for new adventures, things we’d like to improve, goals we’d like to reach and a year better than the last. While we can’t plan for what we can’t control, we can make goals for what we can.

This is my 2014 “wish list” for myself, genealogically speaking:

  1. Get my BCG portfolio turned in (My deadline is December 15, 2014!)
  2. Write at least 3 major articles (These are aside from those that may appear in my home society’s quarterly.)
  3. Gain 1 new client per month
  4. Speak/teach at least 12 times this year

Ok, that list feels short to me. But look at number 1! I’m going to keep the list short because that first one is a doozy! I really should just make that one item the only goal I expect from myself this year, but I am an overachiever so of course I put more items on my list.

Good luck to you and I hope you take some time to make a few goals for yourself this year.

Happy New Year Everyone!!!

 

Year End Recap – Unplanned Goals

Genealogical Goals,
My Gold-Star Certificate
My Gold-Star Certificate

We can plan and plan, but life always has a plan of its own. Sometimes things come up that take you off course of your own goals, and sometimes that is for the better. When you look back at the things you accomplish, you may notice that sometimes things happen that you hadn’t planned on, opportunities “knocked” and you opened the door.

Here are some things that I accomplished this year that I hadn’t planned on:

Continuing Education Program – I had the opportunity to develop and teach a 4-week beginning genealogy class through my local community college.

FGS committee – I was asked to participate on a committee with FGS. It was a lot of fun and great to meet and work with some genealogists that I really admire and respect.

Gold Star – I had the surprise and pleasure of earning a gold star from Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Advanced Methods course at IGHR.

Legacy Quick Guides – I had the opportunity to write five legacy quick guides, which was an amazing experience. They are:

Sometimes the goals you don’t plan turn out to be some of the best accomplishments you didn’t plan for. Take a look back over your year and see what you’ve done you didn’t plan on. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Year End Recap – Short Term Goals

Genealogical Goals
Samford University
Samford University

While long-term goals can carry over a period of time, I generally expect my short-term goals to be smaller and easier to accomplish. Let’s see how I did this year. My short-term goals for 2013 were:

  • Revise and post my mission statement on my website.
  • Attend GRIP and IGHR provided I get into the desired courses.
  • Add “Mentoring” to my business plan.
  • Attend more online webinars, explore and read more blogs, read the books and magazines I’ve gathered.
  • Create some new programs. I’ve been a little stagnant lately and have not created any new programs to present to local societies.
  • Do more work for my society’s Quarterly.

Here’s the breakdown:

Put my mission statement on my website – I did this as a part of my ProGen study this year. You can view it here in the intro of my website.

Attend GRIP and IGHR – I did get into the courses I wanted and they were quite exciting courses to take! I was lucky enough to have taken Elizabeth Shown Mills’ last Advanced Methods course at IGHR! And I thoroughly enjoyed Tom Jones’ Mastering Genealogical Proof course at GRIP.

Add “Mentoring” to my business plan – I’ve termed consultation now, instead of mentoring. I wavered back and forth over this and feel like mentoring is a personal relationship that develops and can’t be forced or bought, but I can offer consulting services.

Attend more online webinars… – I’ve been watching a lot more of these while I work on organizing in my office or scan documents. I seem to have hit the limit on the number of blogs I can easily follow. There are a lot of us out there blogging and as much as I’d love to read them all, I just can’t. So I have a few of my favorites and I skim the headlines of the rest. As for my books and magazines, I’ve done some work on this but it is a more time-consuming project.

Create some new programs – I have created a new 4-week beginner course curriculum and I have a new lecture on County Histories. I am in the process of writing another one that will be done in January, an Ohio case study.

Do more work for my society’s Quarterly – I have done some of this. I have been extracting data from a ledger from the Boulder Superintendent’s visits to schools and have turned some of it in to the Quarterly editor.

So all in all I am quite pleased with the outcome of my short-term goals for this year. Invariably, things happen that weren’t planned. Next I will discuss the things I accomplished that weren’t on either of these lists.

Year End Recap – Long Term Goals

Genealogical Goals, , ,

notepadWhen I create goals, I like to create two kinds of goals, long-term and short-term. Generally the short-term goals feed into the long-term goals. Also, short-term goals tend to be smaller, easier, things you can take care of quickly whereas long-term goals take more time, planning, determination, and consistency. The completion of short-term goals gives you the sense of accomplishment and the momentum to keep up with the long-term goals.

Last year I created a list of my Long-Term goals for 2013. There were as follows:

  • Organize my office (this is more of an ongoing, every day resolution, but still, I need to keep it visually handy).
  • “Process” my binders. This is in relation to my organization system according to family groups. I recently changed it a little bit and so all of my families need to be caught up.
  • Finish and submit my BCG application by December. (I went “on the clock” at the end of December 2012.)

Let me break them down by goal:

Organize my office – I’m happy to report that this is possibly the only one that I feel is pretty much done. This summer we finally finished our basement and built a very nice home office (that I’m mentioned before). I have plenty of file cabinets, shelves, and desk space to keep my genealogy organized.

“Process” my binders – I know that most of you don’t even know what this means, but in terms of updating my research organizing system, I’ve only done 2 or 3 of these binders. I have about 20. So, while I’ve done some, it’s not as far along as I’d like. I’ll keep working on it.

Finish and submit my BCG application – Well, some things happened with this that have caused me to get an extension. For one thing, I did a lot more education in preparation for the BCG than I had previously thought I would. This was a good thing. In taking those courses, I realized that I would need some more time to really do it right. My new deadline is December 15, 2014. This will make an appearance on my 2014 goals list.

So even though I did maybe half of my long-term goals, I feel like I made quite a lot of progress. These are LONG-TERM goals after all and it’s ok if they carry over to the next year’s list.

 

Year End Recap – 2013

Genealogical Goals, ,

snowflakeDecember… this is a month of mixed emotions for me. I love the holiday decorations, the sparkly lights, trees, snowflakes, and especially snowmen (they’re cute). But it also involves a lot of busy-ness, places to go, kids’ programs and parties to navigate, gifts to buy, wrap and deliver. Stores are crowded. It’s not my favorite time to be out and about. And it can be so cold, and it’s always dark, and I really just feel like hibernating until March.

Despite that, I love that a new year is looming, it’s a feeling of a fresh start, a chance to do some things differently and make new goals. It’s an arbitrary date, January 1, you can “turn a new leaf” anytime during the year, but there’s something about the changing of the calendar that just gets me excited for new things. Last year I made public my goals for 2013. I’m going to take some time to review how I did and examine things I did that were not on the list. It is easy to get caught up in day-to-day mini-roadblocks that I forget to look at the bigger picture and see that I actually did get stuff done.

This series of posts will look at my 2013 goals in more detail and will end with my goals for 2014. I encourage everyone to take some time to do this for themselves, several times throughout the year even, in order to gain some perspective.  I hope you join me in this activity to see where you stand with your goals.

Happy December!

 

Genealogy Gratitude – The Genealogy Husband

Genealogy General, , ,

mensethI will finish this series off with a sincere gratitude for my spouse, Seth. He’s the ultimate in being supportive of my genealogy obsession. He supports me, not only financially, but with helping out with the kids when I want to take off on a genealogy adventure. Sometimes, when he gets to come along on those adventures, he’ll be my microfilm fetcher, reader or scanner, or my tombstone spotter. He’s always accommodating when it comes to taking a side trip to visit a far flung cemetery or repository. He also helped build the aforementioned home office (and didn’t once demand a “man cave”), moved many books, shelves, desks, filing cabinets and office supplies to and fro. He also let me pick the bright colors we painted on the walls.

Overall, he is the best genealogy husband a girl could ask for! I love you honey!

 

Genealogy Gratitude – Volunteers

Genealogy General,
Thank You!
Thank You!

You’ve seen them. Maybe you’ve been one. But you’ve definitely benefited from them. Genealogy volunteers! They tirelessly index records, sit at a library help desk, do look-ups, teach classes, mentor, lead genealogy societies, plan events, write articles, edit quarterlies and newsletters, send emails … they do it all. I know that I personally have benefited from many hours of volunteer time. This is my shout out to all volunteers who are, ever was or ever will be giving of their time freely for the benefit of others! It is another aspect of how awesome the genealogical community is!  THANK YOU!