Weekly Wrap-up: Dec. 6-12, 2020

I finally decided to get back to genealogy blogging this week! This year’s been a horrible for trying to stay focused on anything for long, but I’m determined to at least accomplish SOMETHING before the end of the year. As part of that, I’m going to start keeping track of what I do each week.

This Week (Dec. 6-12)

1. Continued to manually add in relatives to my new genealogy program, MacFamily Tree. Currently at 75/157 people.
I decided to manually build my new tree so I could double-check sources, download documents, and make sure everything’s matched correctly. Sometimes GEDCOM imports put things in weird places, and I’d rather just have it correct from the start. It’ll also give me an opportunity to fill out my To Do list properly, which I’ll use to build a research plan later. I need to finish doing this before March [something], when my current Ancestry subscription expires.

2. Attended 3 webinars and wrote blog posts of my experience.
12/9/20: Using County Histories (LegacyFamilyTree)
12/10/20: Finding the Living (American Ancestors)
12/10/20: Same Name, Must be the Same Person (Georgia Genealogical Society)

I discovered two things this week re:webinars: first, I prefer watching live ones rather than pre-recorded ones, as it feels more like an exciting event! Second, I can use my Macbook’s Airplay to beam the webinar video to my Roku and watch it on my TV! This is much more comfortable than watching it on a laptop. I’ll write a how-to post about that later on.

3. Attended Southern California Genealogical Society’s annual meeting (online).
One benefit of so many genealogy events moving online is that I finally get to attend SCGS meetings! Normally I’d never be able to make it, since they’re in Burbank and I’m in Anaheim, and I’d have to take the train in and then spend the night– way too much time and money to attend one meeting. But now I can comfortably join in from my own home. Huzzah!

This meeting discussed finances, membership (both significantly down from last year), the 1890 Project, and Genetic Genealogy/Jamboree 2021 (among other things). The Genetic Genealogy/Jamboree will be online next year, which is smart. I’m planning on attending so I can support the Society and the conference itself, in the hopes that we’ll get another one in 2022. Registration for 2021 opens January 11th!

4. Signed up for RootsTech Connect 2021.
RootsTech is a major genealogy conference held in Salt Lake City every year; I’ve never been able to attend before, mostly due to travel costs. 2021’s conference will be held online and FREE! And over my birthday weekend to boot.

5. Checked Newspapers.com for newly added articles.
Newspapers.com is very generous with their free 7 day trials, and I somehow qualified for another one despite just having a paid account back in October. I checked the new listings and found some articles for a black sheep family member in the 1960s that I hadn’t seen before. Lucky!

Next Week (Dec. 13-19)

• There are three live webinars that I’d like to attend, but unfortunately two of them are at the same time so I’ll have to figure out which one to drop.
• I purchased a book for my library that should be coming in this week, so I’d like to look through it and add it to my Library section here.
• I will continue manually adding in relatives. I’m almost done with my father’s main line, though I need to fill out dates and things for siblings/cousins/etc.
• My unsorted documents folder is getting a little unwieldy, so I’ll need to organize what I can before it gets too bad.
• And I’d like to write at least one blog post (non-webinar related).