Motivation Monday: Week of February 13
As with each week I am recapping what I have completed each week to bring me closer to attaining the goals I have set for the month and the year as well. Posted below are all of my goals and what I did the first week of the month to attain these goals is in blue and what I have done this past week is in red.
Research: To put together a spreadsheet in Numbers (it’s a Mac spreadsheet program) to follow to great-great grandparents and their children through the census records. Once I have completed this for each of the families I will begin to form a research plan based on what I have and do not have, I will be doing this is Growly Notes to clearly label what my next step is and what my findings are as I go through the process. While setting these steps up, it is important to advise that my Ancestry subscription is up within a few days and I will not renew it right away.
I have pulled all the information into the spreadsheets for each family and have also marked what I am missing. For some of the information, I have already searched on Ancestry.com to find the missing census records. I started going through all of my research on the Richmond family and notating what I have and need to do next in Growly Notes, I need to continue this process for each family until all information has been added and a clear research plan is written. I received a 14 day trial membership to Ancestry with the purchase of FTM for Mac 2, so I have about a week left to do this before I need to start heading to the library to do my research.
Well, I thought I had all of my families pulled into Numbers spreadsheets and as I started going through the families, I noticed that I missed a few of them. Now, to be honest two of the families are not families I have really done any research in and the third family I have minimal information on. The two families that I have not researched are because there are other family members that have researched them in the past or are currently researching them. The good news is that once I started pulling information on these families together I found and posted some marriage records on my personal facebook page and one cousin who has research our Hilton family asked me to email it to him. Which means, he did not have the information. Thanks to Family Search for adding records all the time and keeping our research fresh!
As for putting information into Growly Notes, I have set up a template of all the information I want to capture. Each family has research notes started on them. I am pulling birth, marriage, military, death and burial information to start with. On some families, I have added work history if it seems that they changed jobs with each census. By doing this, I have already started a list of things I would like to look up at the ACPL in March.
Writing: I need to write some posts for my blog that will be prescheduled to publish. In Nov and Dec, I had so many obituaries set to publish through January. It was nice to have that buffer of posts going out and not having to think about what I will write for the current week. I have printed out the editorial calendar from Geneabloggers and will utilize that to help me get ahead. I have already gone through it and highlighted the posts I would like to write. Now, I just need to get writing.
So far, I have no posts planned ahead for my blog. I decided yesterday that I needed to create a calendar and really put my information into it. I have added the mundane, normal life stuff like driving my daughter to school and her other activities, as well as the time I need to check social media and reply to emails. For today, this has really worked. I am keeping to everything I have scheduled and maybe finishing up a few minutes early to move on to the next task.
Anyhow, I have scheduled an hour of writing time for Monday – Friday with hopes that this will get some post pre-written and ready to go. I have not added the bloggers editorial calendar to this because I do not want to over kill my calendar. I do have it printed and will be consulting it as I write daily.
I have not done a lot of pre-blogging. I currently have 1 post set for Tuesday and I am writing this on Sunday, so I am a bit ahead. But, I need to work harder at this.
The calendar and scheduled time slots are really helping me. This week was rough though, we have had major tv and internet issues (as I type, I have had to write this twice because my internet froze and lost all of my information). It seems that AT&T will be losing business in the near future. I just need to decide what service we will be going with and get that scheduled asap.
Organization: I pulled down about 98% of my genealogy related books and magazines into my office already, which was my goal for January. So, I would like to find the few pieces I am missing to complete this part of my goal. I also will start organizing my desk, between my genealogy and travel it’s a mess. Need to get it together so that working in either field will be more efficient for me.
Only thing organizational I have done this last week is creating the calendar I mentioned above. The desk is the next step.
Need to get working on that desk!
Education: February 1st starts ProGen 15 for me and a few of my other genealogy friends. You can bet we will be writing about our experience and learnings on this. Need to get to my Chicago Public Library to pick up a copy of Professional Genealogy which I will use until I purchase my copy. From what I have read ahead of time, we will need to put about 20 hours a month towards this class that lasts 18 months.
ProGen started on 1 Feb and I was so excited. I have decided that I will read the assignment when it is given and then again right before our monthly chat session. So, on 1 Feb I completed my reading assignment. I need to write out the citations we received and write a mission statement for my (future) business. Last night was our first group chat and it was great. I think we have a great group of people that we will be working with and many of them are bloggers. I have already signed up to follow each of their blogs and followed those who are twitter and finally friended those I could find on Facebook (sounds like I am a stalker). I am really excited about this journey we are all taking.
I started on my citations assignment for ProGen and need to write my mission statement for my future genealogy business.
All in all it has been a good week, even with all the internet issues. I feel I accomplished enough for the first half of the month. So, since we are in the middle of the month, how are you doing with accomplishing your goals?
