New Year's Resolutions

This is a cross-post from my other blog: From Maine to Kentucky, though there are a few differences.

I generally avoid New Year's Resolutions, but this year, with the announcement that Family Tree Maker is being retired, it prompted me to share my primary genealogy resolutions for 2016: By the end of 2016, I will have decided on a new genealogy software program and will have "cleaned up" my data, especially sources, in the process.

I have been reading about Thomas MacEntee's Genealogy Do-Over and I think that if I am exploring new genealogy software in 2016 then it's a good year for a Do-Over (or at least a Go-Over: I have over 5,000 people in my primary tree and I don't want to enter everyone from scratch). I also have a few separate family trees in Family Tree Maker for extended family members and I have to decide if I want to put all of these trees together into one big family tree, or if I want to keep separate trees for the extended family members and create a separate family tree for my husband and his ancestors.

See Genealogy Do-Over: 2016 Topics for more information. You can subscribe to this blog by RSS feed or by email. There is also a Facebook Group for the Genealogy Do-Over where members are very helpful.

If I don't blog as often as I did last year, it's because I'm working on cleaning up my Family Tree Maker database in order to transfer it to new software. I will blog about interesting stories that I find during this "Genealogy Go-Over" process.

My other resolution (which I may not have enough time for) is to explore DNA matches at Family Tree DNA for my husband and his parents. If there are any cousins who are interested in testing, please let me know! I have written several posts about my husband's DNA test results. I am hoping more relatives test because it gives us (the relative and me) the opportunity to find out where on our chromosomes that we match, which in turn gives us the ability to determine how we match to more distant cousins and who our common ancestor is with those distant cousins. With the minimal paper trail into the 19th century, and the endogamy found in Jewish genealogy, this is a particular challenge; DNA testing can really help.

Even if you don't have a specific New Year's Resolution, I hope 2016 is productive, happy and healthy!