Sorting Family History

Susan Olsen LeBlanc September 28 at 7:30 PM · Shared with Public Bought my favorite notebooks, page protectors for original documents and nice, colorful dividers. The last part of sorting I am finding more duplication! The change in copies relates to technology advanced over the years.

Serendipity in the Process of Writing

In the process of writing a family history book and it seems every time I pause in writing up pops something else that I need next. This week I found an online index of NEHGS and Essex County Vital Records for the town books up to 1850. This lead me to an easy resource for those records on Internet Archive. I should have made a list of these occurrences. Serendipity is one focus of my personal blog: gophergenealogy.blogspot.com

The Book Process

I am still working on my book project. The research phase includes following all the bread crumbs left by previous researchers. When I finish with one, up pops another one. It is an amazing process. After reading an article about PERSI yesterday I went to explore the new set up at Allen County Public Library in Indiana. I found that my two articles are there as well as some for the surnames, but some are missing. The best part are the new listings of some older articles and some more recent. Today I sent in a request, which they replied to promptly and started working on today. The timeliness of these new discoveries feels like true serendipity. The key to it all is keeping an orderly record of where I have been, where I am at and what I want to do in the future.

Lifetime Project

I am going through my work on an ancestral line for my book. It is amazing what I did in the seventies, eighties and nineties and again in the twenties. Very little duplicate research and very well organized notebooks. Back in the day I made a lot of paper copies. Pages and pages of reference materials with title pages and versos. Now that my finances are different I have purchased some of the books, even some of them gently used. This is a lifetime project, with much of the information now in electric format. Not sure where it will go in the future, but for now I am enjoying every moment of this.