A new start, A Do Over, A new year.

 

A new start/new year Lets do a Do-Over!!

Welcome to 2015!!

 

       To start, welcome to the dusting off of my Genealogy Blog "Working Tree Hunter".

            I started this blog years ago and did not get very far with it. My hope for the New Year is to be better about using this as I work on my family tree. Please bear with the writing as it is not something that I am very good at.

            Thomas MacEntee has challenged us all to a 2015 Do-Over as listed at http://genealogydo-over.com. You can find a list of topics at http://www.geneabloggers.com/genealogy-doover-schedule-top…/

            I thought this was an amazing idea and reactivated my Ancestry.com account looked at my tree and boy do I need this do-over. I joined the Facebook Do-Over website that Thomas started that at this publishing has 1236 members. Boy did the posts start flying as people joined. Many great conversations where started, and talked about as people got excited about moving forward with their own personal do-over. Questions were asked about software, websites, researching techniques. A lot of great ideas have been shared since it was first announced.

 

 I posted early on about “if I do this where should I do it at?” In years past I had primarily used Ancestry.com, but had also used Wiki, Family Tree Maker, and Family Search. I started a Myheritage.com tree but in the end at least temporarily decided to use Ancestry.com. I did the first thing I could think and started a new tree. One of the things that I wanted to do with this new tree is not use other personal ancestry trees as a source as I have done in years past. So I have been hitting ignore these hints as they have come up.

The next thing I did while interacting with the group on Facebook was to come up with an excel spreadsheet to track the census that I found. I started with a master name list so that I could list the family names when they were born and died. By doing this I could then track when they should have shown up on the census. This list is being populated in order that I find the people in the Census. I created a page for each year that the census has been published and though there hasn’t been any released after 1940 I included the years to come to track people that lived after 1940 that I might include in my tree. It had a lot of good responses and I used one of the first idea’s proposed and that was to instead of an “X” to track that I had found a census for someone on the master list I could put the age that the census listed them at in that column.

 

That is what I have today Hope everyone has a Great New Years!