Summertime, and the livin’ is easy . . . for the kids, lol.
School’s out and for us it’s all about keeping the kids busy, happy, and creating great memories. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for “genealogy.” It’s not going to be the summer of starting projects that turn into all day genealogy binges; I’ve counted the Saturdays till my oldest is gone, and it’s too few; this summer I have a new challenge: a 15 minute limit.
What can actually be accomplished in 15 minutes? Here are a few of my 15 minutes a day accomplishments:
- Read the MyHeritage blog about their recently released Sun Charts-needless to say I want one.
- Made a Sun Chart for my side of the family. (MyHeritage generates these automatically, but I gazed adoringly for at least 10 minutes.)
- Inspired by Sun Charts, I called a sister-in-law and got the birth information for all her children and added them into my MyHeritage tree.
- Called a second sister-in-law and got the missing birth information for all her children and added them into my MyHeritage tree.
- Called my only living aunt and got birth, marriage, and death information for my uncle, cousins & spouses and added them into my tree.
- Over several days I became a cyber-stalker and downloaded immediate and distant family’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you-name-it-social-media-account photos to my tree. (Did you know people can download your photos from Facebook, etc. I’m mildly freaked out every time I do this.)
- Participated in #genchat (Friday night Twitter chat group) and learned more about DNA genealogy and found some new friends and new Twitter accounts to follow. (Disclaimer, this felt like 15 minutes but actually took an hour. If you don’t have that kind of time you can search #genchat on Twitter and spend 15 minutes reading past chats w/o participating.)
- Participated in the FamilySearch July 15-17 WorldWide Indexing challenge and I kid you not, found a batch that took ~15 minutes.
- Talked to my uncle on the phone & got more health info to add to my TapGenes family tree.
- Learned about a free webinar I missed, arghhh, and searched for more free webinars to try to catch.
- Gathered all the miscellaneous spiral notebooks in the house and searched them for random genealogy notes-will sort and organize later, but literally, this was a feat.
- Made plans for a family reunion in a few weeks.
So, I haven’t broken down any brick walls, but I’m having fun reaching out to living family and keeping our family tree up-to-date and accurate. It’s nice to have a daily goal that’s attainable and keeps family at the forefront of my thoughts each day.
I know it doesn’t look like much but check your tree, does it include all the new babies and cousins? 15 minutes a day might just get you where you want to be without pulling you away from family. Good luck!