
Ah, I can’t help but feel good about this story 🙂
In case you were wondering what happened to my postings this month, well I can only say that I’ve been catching up after serving as a page at the Daughters of the American Revolution state conference.
I did discover a delightful new site, thanks to Jan Franco on Find A Grave – so if you have any family in Connecticut, check out The Connecticut Gravestone Network‘s website. They’re far more concerned with conservation than genealogy, but they have some super links on their website, and – like Jan, above – encourage others to help in the work.
To boot, the Executive Directer, Ruth called me last week. She’s super nice, and very knowledgeable – check out her site, and let her know what you think!
The 1940 US Federal Census is going to be released in 24 days, much to the great excitement of just about any genealogist with roots in America. I receive emails daily with titles like these:
The truth of the matter is that the census is not going to be indexed for an indeterminate amount of time. Until that index is available, there will be no handy texts to reference, no searches to be done on Ancestry or FamilySearch. Optical Character Recognition is spotty enough about recognizing type, so it really won’t be that useful on handwritten records.
But you shouldn’t despair! Here are seven handy ways to narrow down your search.
Good luck and Good Hunting!!!
http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=226. This is an excellent article by one of my favorite genealogists. Every time that I read one of her articles or hear her lecture or read her books, I leave with a head full of fun new things to explore!
You think it doesn’t? It can build up after a while!
I currently have one client, and I’ve been working on 5 trees (1 for me, 2 for friends, and 2 for the Daughters of the American Revolution). The DAR and Daughters of the Confederacy registrars have also been using me as a sort of go-to-gal for documents that they’re having trouble finding, or for transcriptions (10 years of reading physician handwriting have paid off).
In the last month, I have downloaded 846 photo files and scanned documents, 76 pdf’s, 22 Word documents (four of them were books of 100+ pages). When you save a photo or media file to Family Tree Maker, you end up with at least 6 copies of it (the one I saved to my hard drive, the one on the current tree, and the 4 backups I made throughout the month). I know better on the backups – ultimately, they get stored in an encrypted folder on the cloud drive, with only the most recent on my laptop – but I got really lazy on the original ones that I saved to add to FTM, and hadn’t cleaned out my temp folder this month.
All told, when I cleaned out my genealogy storage this afternoon, and emptied my Recycle Bin, it was 12.6 gig of data. And I’m not even a full time genealogist.
My computer is not even a year old, so I don’t have any appreciable increase in speed from my monthly cleaning, but anyone with an older computer should take note and clean out your files every once in a while. I think I will move my schedule up to every two weeks, while I’m in the busy season.
If you look up the top of this lovely theme, you’ll see that I’m finally starting to build out this blog a little bit. I’ve added an ‘About’ page and one for my family (the Mullenwegs). Keep your eye on this spot for more updates…I don’t know when. I’m working on several projects at once, so that’s slowing me up, but I plan to have a scan-a-palooza this weekend, and maybe I’ll start to get some of those pictures and artifacts up here.
Do you have any suggestions, comments, or questions? Then email me for goodness sake! 🙂
Yours, CM