I found a really great post on New Year’s Resolutions for Genealogists that may help you get “back on track” if you are not sure of your direction for the new year.
If 2008 went by as quickly for you as it did for me, you didn’t have time to work on or complete many genealogical projects. Let’s hope 2009 will give each of us more time to spend on this fascinating hobby.
At this time of year, thoughts turn to New Year’s resolutions. While a great concept, the basic procedure is faulty – that is, you are spending time making a list but spending no time planning to do anything on the list. (More about lists later.)
Instead of lists, in the past few years I’ve spent my ‘resolution’ time planning and I encourage you to do the same. Here are some planning ideas:
• Review brick-wall or problem lines and develop a research plan. Consider creating chronologies, maps and timelines for the people and families involved. In certain cases, it may be a good idea to “restart” from scratch. Reread research guides for the locations where these people lived. Check to see if any new materials have been published that might apply to the problem.
It is very common for a person irrespective of his or her background to want to learn more about the family history, and given that in recent times there has been a lot of demand for finding out as much as possible about family history and also genealogy lists services, people need this information and the best option open to them is to know how genealogy search can be done fast, efficiently and with best results. This may be easier said than done because now that it is possible to conduct genealogy search through the medium of the Internet, there is vast amount of information available, and so more people are using this medium for conducting their genealogy search.
The Internet Will Throw Up Mountains Of Information
We all have been given a great resource in the Internet to search for vast amount of information, which beats searching manually through old dusty files hidden away in some antique labrary which may take hours or days of searching. Today, you can easily conduct genealogy search through the Internet and find birth records, marriage and death certificates and even addresses all of which was once very difficult to achieve.
So, today if you are wondering about your family ancestry, you can join hundreds who are hooked onto genealogy freeware, who can, without much fuss or bother, begin to build your own family tree using simple genealogy search methods. Search family records, approximate year of birth, death, marriage, and lookup census records and that should give you the information that you’re looking to attain.
One thing that you should make a point of while conducting genealogy search whether it is via the Internet or looking through library records, you will be able to make better discoveries and thus unearth little known facts related to your family, and who knows, even get to know of less known secrets as well. There will be times when you will hit a wall with your genealogy search leading to frustration, so be prepared to face obstacles. In the end, the time you put into your genealogy search should prove to be fruitful as well as a bit of an adventure in it.
Have you ever seen the game “Where’s Waldo?” Sometimes finding your family can be much like that as you find many family members with the same surname.
Today I found a very interesting tool, that while wont give you a definitive result of where your family name originated it will give you all the places where there are people with that surname.
Its called the World Names Profiler, and what is really fun about this is that you may have thought that your family originated and is predominately from one area and another that you never considered is shown with the numbers per thousand of that surname.
I have long known that my surname is of Irish decent but what really baffles me is that almost as many come from Australia. Now I KNOW that, but for some reason I cant link to the Aussies. Things that make you go hmmmmmmm.
The site shows you an interactive world map and color codes the density of the surname. If you click on the country it does a further breakdown for you. This is not as refined as I would like but it does do “well enough” to get a good idea.
So, if you are just a tad curious, check out the site and have a little fun… you may find out something you had never considered before. The site: World Names Profiler
