My New Year's Research Resolutions

This is always a good time to look back on the old year, and its accomplishments and failures, and to also look ahead to projects for the new year.  Last year's accomplishments include publishing my first book and starting to promote it, albeit in a pretty untutored way. Let's just say I could use a crash course in twenty-first century marketing, especially about leveraging social media. I completed a very involved genealogical research project for clients which involved sorting and scanning thousands of old documents and photographs, and then finding homes for them in various archives. I also attended the annual American Library Association conference and the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, where I shook hands with the impressive Elizabeth Shown Mills. I was hired for my first library consulting gig, and started this blog. I also wrote about three quarters of another book.

In 2017, the to-do list will not get any shorter. I will attend ALA midwinter, and also the Association of Library Science Educators Conference in Atlanta this month. I need to finish my second book, and find a literary agent and publisher. Because that book is a timeline of three hundred years of New Orleans history, I am under the gun to finish because the New Orleans tricentennial is in 2018. And then I would like to get back to my own research!

Thinking it over, I realized that when I return to it, I need to prioritize my efforts in the following way:

1. Ask it!  I need to come up with more oral history questions for my dad, his half sister, and his stepmother. My dad collapsed last summer due to congestive heart failure and ended up having a quadruple bypass and a valve replacement. My step grandmother is 93, and starting to lose her mental sharpness.  I must do this before this window closes forever.

2. Reduce it!  I need to systematically go through my files, make sure all the information is transferred from family group sheets onto Family Tree, and then pitch them, along with any printouts of census records and other stuff from my early researching days. There's just no point to hanging onto all this paper.

3. Scan it!  While I have scanned hundreds of old documents and photos, many more remain, especially because relatives keep giving me more. Yes, like my mother before me, I am The Keeper.  Just this week, an elderly cousin of my deceased father-in-law called to say she was sending some old letters, documents and photos.  In the batch was my husband's great grandparents' original marriage certificate!  I was amazed that in such a large family, and after a few generations, that this precious document made its way to us.  It is already scanned and on Family Tree.

                                      Marriage certificate of Henry Irvin and Deborah Irena Riegle, now in my possession.

4.  Track it!  I am determined that I will make a better effort to find information that is not either located or indexed online. I know that lots of records are hiding out in churches, local repositories, and in distant relatives' attics.  Some sleuthing and determination will reveal them. You never know who has "the stuff" in the family until you ask--absolutely everyone.

What are your research resolutions?