FINALLY Get Organized – February it was a rough month!

February 24, 2016

You can join in by following Dear Mrytle’s “FINALLY Get Organized” athttp://blog.dearmyrtle.com/p/finally-get-organized.htm

The trials and tribulations of February's organizational tasks.....

It was going to be a great week - my cast was due to be taken off my broken ankle and life would be returning to normal. I must confess the wheelchair has greatly reduced my ability to fully use my office. The bad news - my ankle did not heal to the Doctor's satisfaction so back in a cast I went. The February's organization started off easy enough, start working on your mother's maiden line and fill in collateral's. RootsMagic made the tasks easy - then my computer started randomly shutting down. I managed to save my work to the cloud and a passport drive and spent about four hours on the phone getting "help" with my computer. Needless to say there was no help, the computer was sent to Dell (it was only a few months old) I did continue working on my organization. Luckily for me the tasks for the second week of the month involved the review of the GPS (Genealogical Proof Standard) from the Board of Certification of Genealogists, reading blog posts and reviewing videos from Dear Myrtle's "What Does She Say? Study Group" from August 14th and 21st of 2015. Lastly for the week, we were to make research notes on our to-do lists were our evidence was weak. That task overlapped with a ProGen assignment so accomplished a two for one.

The week of the 14th through the 20th was a little tougher. I reworked my citations using my handy Evidence Explained copy. I have begun to tab and mark EE to save time. I reviewed ESM's Quick Lesson 22 and watched two more "What Does She Say? Study Group" from 28 August and 4 September 2015 - and I kept falling asleep. They were not boring I just physically exhausted. On day three of being tired,a rash devolved all over my body - just a viral infection the doc says that steals four days away.....

The last week of February - rash is gone, computer is back, cast was removed! I am learning to walk with one foot in a brace and the other in a walking cast. I am slow but I have been able to access all my paperwork (the wheelchair made that task difficult) and am continuing to add birth, marriages, and deaths to my four generations. I am starting to work on submitting my conclusions into my software program when my sources are multiple for a single event, a practice that I had not been doing - I am reformed.....

I am hoping for a light day tomorrow so I may watch DearMyrtle's "Written Conclusion Study Group" and reread Chapter 7 of Thomas W. Jones' Mastering Genealogical Proof. I am so happy I made the decision to start again - adding to a database that I had maintained for over fifteen years just wasn't working - I have matured as a researcher and my database needed to mature also.