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My husband and I just returned from a two week vacation. What with the preparation prior to the trip and being sick since we’ve returned home, I’ve been away from my research now for about 4 weeks.
That’s a long time for me. Since I’m retired, I have the luxury of being able to set my own schedule (in other words, I can research pretty much as often as I want to). Isn’t that what we all hope for? Of course I still have other interests and activities, but I generally have time to sit down each day and do some sort of research. Sometimes that’s just cleaning up images or reviewing what I’ve recently located.
Today’s question is, where do I begin? Which line of the family do I want to focus on right now? I keep copious research notes in my Legacy database. I enter the date I’ve done something and what that something was, what I located, where it was located etc. This allows me to return to a particular ancestor and see exactly what I’ve done and when.
Legacy keeps track of the last 200 people I’ve viewed. That will give me some idea of where I’ve been recently.
To view your History list in Legacy go to the View tab and select “History List.” Because I use this list all the time, I have included it in My Toolbar, where it is readily available.
Here is where you will find the History List in your Legacy program.
As I viewed my History List today, I was able to go back to some of the people I was working on prior to vacation. This helps bring back my train of thought at the time (well, at least I hope it does).
Another way I will decide who I might want to work on, is to go to my Ancestry tree and see what hints have popped up. You know, the little shaky leaf. When I first went onto Ancestry after my return there were 64 new hints. As we know, new hints tend to generate as you work on people in your tree. When I see a red number above the leaf I always check to see who the hints are for. Is it someone I want to look at or a distant family connection or possibly someone I don’t want to work on right now?
NOTE: I have turned off Member Tree hints. This way, I am only seeing hints for record collections or media. I can turn those Member Tree hints back on any time.
Another thing I did during our vacation, was to keep up with genealogy Facebook groups I belong to. I learn a lot from those groups. However, I don’t want to spend a lot of time online while on vacation. When I came across something of interest I used the “save link” option in Facebook, which allows me to come back to that item. Once I returned home I spent some time reviewing articles and tutorial videos. One of the videos was a tutorial for using the Chronicling America newspaper site. The tips I learned helped me to immediately find a death notice from 1838. Definitely worthwhile.
With this said, now it’s time to decide where my next research adventure will begin.
I’d like to know what method you use to pick up your research when you’ve been away. Maybe it was only a few weeks, perhaps months or even years. Where do you begin?
Stay tuned for more posts about our family. Hopefully I can connect with some new cousins or help others researching their own families.
Happy hunting,
Michigan Girl
Copyright © 2010-2017 Diane Gould Hall
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION