Randy has his weekly Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge posted at Genea-Musings. I don’t have my blog on Blogger so I wasn’t affected by the downtime. My blogs are hosted on my own web space at 1and1.com. That doesn’t mean I’ll never experience down time. Anything can happen out on the web.
I’m not that active of a blogger, so I’ll answer this differently. What genealogy things would I do to fill my time if I lost internet access for an extended period of time? The Horror!!!!!
I think I would concentrate on two projects.
1. I have an ongoing project of verifying, inputting, and organizing my computerized genealogy documents.
After I moved and settled in, I had a chance to look over my genealogy stuff. What a mess!!! My problems started when too darn many documents became available for me to research online. Don’t get me wrong! I love finding records…and I’m searching all the time. It was sort of a supply and demand problem. My collection of documents soon outgrew my ability to analyze and input them in a timely fashion.
On top of that, I was dealing with multiple family health issues. Taking care of others not only took up alot of my time, but it took up alot of my energy.
What I found was my files were a mess. I added terms like “input done” to file names, but I wasn’t consistent. I changed the way I organized my folders in 2009. So, I had half my documents in family group folders on my computer and the other half were under the type of document like “California Marriage Records”. It made it impossible for me to know if I’d input a record or if I even had it.
So, I would spend my downtime working on those folders. I have them all organized by family groups. Now I’m going through the painstaking process of verifying each one. I’m marking them clearly if the input is done and I’m moving them to a brand new root directory so that I don’t have to touch the same documents twice.
2. The blue binder has been sitting on my desk since I moved. Right before I moved, I learned a ton of stuff about some of my Portuguese lines. I translated information, wrote up pedigree charts, and have it all documented. But I never got the information input.
It involves added 10 pedigree charts full of ancestors (a couple of people already in my database) to my Pacheco-de Braga database. Then, I have to go back and add the children.
I’d love to get this one done. I think it will show that some of these new lines are going to connect to my other noble lines. I’ll be my own cousin all over again!
So, that is what I would concentrate on if I somehow couldn’t get to the internet and get new genealogy documents 😉 Now perish the thought!
