I was hoping not to do another post reassuring readers I am alive, but another year has gotten away from me. I miss the days when I used to blog all the time. My blogoversary is coming up in a few days (Jan. 26). This blog will be six years old, but it seems that I have not written much in the past two years. Maybe I should just start setting aside one day per week to blog. Maybe Thursday will be my new blogging day.
I see that many of my fellow geneabloggers are following Thomas MacEntee's Genealogy Do-Over. I don't intend to participate myself, but I do enjoy watching what others are doing. I just can't commit to that big of a project right now, though I did a do-over myself a few years ago. I got so tired of all my crap information in my database that I had copied from online trees that I decided to start over again. So far, I have gotten all the facts for my great-grandparents sourced. Now I am working on my great-great-grandparents.
One thing I have learned is that it really pays off to take time with research and get to know my ancestors. I often find myself rushing through research and quickly moving on to the next line without really analyzing the research I have done and finding the holes that I still need to fill. I feel like I have been researching my Proffitt great-great-grandparents forever, but I also feel like I know them, and that is priceless. This time I even went so far as to hire a professional researcher in Oklahoma to gather some records for me, and I have been very pleased with the results. She can do it a lot more efficiently than I could. Now when I do go to Oklahoma, I can spend my time experiencing the places my ancestors lived rather than having to do research the whole time. Of course, I will do some research, but hiring a professional frees up my time to do other things as well.
My next major project is to clean and organize my genealogy office. We bought a nice 4 bedroom house back in March of last year, and I now have my own genealogy office that I don't have to share with my guests when they come to stay. The only problem is that I need to put this office in order so I can use it. I have several boxes that I got from my grandmother's house with items belonging to my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. I need to go through them and probably get archival boxes to store the items. I also need to organize a lot of my paper files. I started doing this before the move, but it is still a work in progress. I go back and forth between wanting to go paperless but yet wanting to have something tangible to refer back to.
Well, that sums up what I've been up to these past few months. I really am going to try to make time to blog on Thursdays. Stay tuned!
