Saturday, March 3, 2012

Bye, February! Hello, March!

I must say that I did much better with my February goals than my January goals. My only regret for February is that I only wrote three blog posts. However, blogging wasn't one of my goals, so I guess that won't count against me....LOL. Here is a recap of my goals and my updates in red.

February Goals:

  • Finish cleaning up the sources and events for the CHAMBERLAIN family and begin working on the CHATTERSON family. 
    • I finished this one right on time. I started the cleanup around the beginning of February or end of January, and just moved on to the Chatterson family this week. 
  • Look up my great-grandparents' and great-great-grandparents' siblings and their spouses and children in the SSDI, just in case access goes away at some point in the future. I really don't think that it will, but just in case...
    • Well, I got to the siblings of my great-grandparents (and even some of the siblings' descendants), but I didn't get to the siblings of my great-great-grandparents. My struggle with this is that my database in RootsMagic only includes part of my research. The rest is in my old Family Tree Maker database, and much of that did not include research on the siblings of my ancestors. To compensate, I've been using those "evil" unsourced online trees to obtain death dates for them.
  • Finish my posts on Arthur CHAMBERLIN and family.
    • This was an epic fail. On second thought, I guess blogging was included in my goals. I don't know what happened to February. Time got away from me. I guess I focused too much on the database cleanup process and the indexing (see below). 
  • Earn 300 points indexing at FamilySearch.
    • Did much better in this area compared to January. I actually got around 600 points total for the quarter, so I made up my slack in January. My goal is 900 points per quarter. I mostly indexed Texas death records. I noticed they had already been indexed, but then I saw a note somewhere that FamilySearch was trying to correct some problems with the initial indexing, so I assume this is why they were being re-indexed. I also indexed a few British census records, but I find these to be difficult because I'm not familiar with the place names and some of the occupations. 
  • Start my Organizing and Skillbuilding course through NIGS. 
    • I started this course. I need to catch up. I'm about a week or two behind. I think I'm okay, though, because it is an 8-week course with only 6 modules instead of 7. The main difference, however, between this and the previous course I took is that this course has more assignments per module. 
On a side note, I did accomplish part of my January goals. I managed to enter my marriage record into my database. I also managed to scan a few PERSI articles for a cousin, which I will enter into my database later. At least they are now scanned. I also wrote back the same cousin and even had lunch with my other cousin who lives near me. Better late than never to catch up on January goals.
 
March Goals:
  • Finish the database cleanup of sources and events for the CHATTERSON and related families. 
  • Visit the LSU Library to find a few obituaries and get back in the swing of Louisiana research in Baton Rouge. I haven't done any research here since I've been back.
  • Earn 300 more points in indexing.
  • Finish my posts on Arthur CHAMBERLIN and family.
  • Reply to at least three or four more cousins who have emailed me within the past few weeks.
  • Add at least three sources from my "to be entered" folder to my RootsMagic database.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a productive genealogy month. What are the points at familysearch.org all about?

    Regards, Jim
    Hidden Genealogy Nuggets

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  2. Hi, Jim! The points at FamilySearch don't mean much right now. I believe that at some point, they will allow users with a certain amount of points to access restricted collections. These would be collections restricted by the records custodians, such as a county clerk who restricts the viewing of birth records occurring after 1912 (less than 100 years old). The points are assigned based on the difficulty of the record transcribed. The higher the difficulty, the more points you can earn per name indexed.

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