Posts have been scarce lately and will continue to be so for another week or two.
I collected quite a bit of new information while in Nebraska and Iowa two weeks ago and as I started to sift through it all, I uncovered some weaknesses in the way I store and enter information in my genealogy program, Legacy 8. For years I’ve been less than meticulous in my data entry, figuring that the most important thing is to capture the information and not worry about proper source citations or consistency. Well, it has finally all caught up with me! My Legacy data does not play well at all with my TNG Family Tree installation (my online family tree). Rather than continuing with the sloppy data, I’m taking a time-out to go back and clean things up. I am also entering all my source documents into a Clooz database. Eventually, I will be able to generate a report showing all the different data sources I have for a particular person in my family tree. That’s worth the week or two of effort that I’m undertaking right now!
I’ll have to start a new discipline of properly sourcing each new piece of information that I get, entering it into Clooz, properly archiving the digital image, and then linking it to the appropriate people in Legacy. That whole process is just a five-minute thing once you get used to it. It’s so much better to take the five minutes for one thing NOW and not let things pile up into into multi-day backlogs.
Writing stories on the blog is infinitely more fun than data clean-up, but my lack of organization has actually started to compromise my ability to tell stories well.
So once the big clean-up is done, here’s what’s coming up, blog-wise:
- I’ll be finishing up the Joe and Annie Rademacher story arc, just a few more posts left to go. Then we’ll switch over to the ancestry of Elizabeth Kreifels (Dale’s grandmother, the wife of Ted Rademacher).
- I think I’ll be heading up to Carbon, Wyoming later this week to visit the old Carbon Cemetery and then drop in at the Hanna Basin Museum again. Mom will be coming along this time.
- I’ll continue with the “Re-visiting Sweden” series with a close-up look at Malte Stierngranat.
- I’ll be sharing the probate records that I dug up from the Saunders County Court while in Nebraska. Some fascinating details about the Pearson and Brodd families turned up, and some interesting tidbits on the Martinson and Rudeen families as well.
