Jen's Genealogy Pages

As a brand new geneablogger, I have never before participated in a Carnival of Genalogy. As there is a first time for everything, I thought I’d start with this one! The topic this time around is: My genealogy research/writing plan for 2011. I have never really planned my research in advance before. It’s usually been a pretty hit and miss approach based on when I had the time and the inclination to do some work. That’s part of the reason I started this blog – I thought it would compel me to actually keep doing research, no matter how slowly. I felt the blog would give me a general direction, hopefully laying out a research/writing plan will give me a more detailed roadmap. 

In essence, my genealogy research/writing plan for 2011 is very simple. To do some – any – genealogy.

Some background: first and foremost, I am a mom to two small children – the preschooler and the baby. I spend most of my days chasing around after them and many of my evenings getting household chores done or sitting in a vegetative state on the sofa.

Second, I am a librarian. Due to the baby, I am currently on maternity leave, which here in Canada lasts for one year. It seems like a long time until you realize the baby is already almost a year old. Consequently, I’ll be going back to work quite soon. While my job involves a great deal of Internet searching and hours of research, pretty much none of it involves genealogy in any shape or form. And when it (rarely) touches on something approximating genealogy, it is certainly not my own!

For these two reasons, any genealogy I actually accomplish in 2011 will be a success story.

That said, I do have some goals for 2011. Whether or not I can realistically accomplish them will be better determined once I’m back at work.

First, I would like to finish going through all of the research I have already completed over the years and work on writing up my mini-biographies on each direct ancestor. While there are times I am positive my bios are of interest to no one but myself, they are helping me to see where exactly the gaps in my research are and are illuminating patterns and other interesting facts that I had previously overlooked. I have completed mini-biographies for my Salter, Davey, Coulman and Fee ancestors and I hope to start systematically moving through the other branches.

In the hopes of maintaining some semblance of order, I am assigning each month a set of ancestors. I will begin in January by working on my Anstead branch.

February – Burton
March – Hunter
April – Lusty
May – Haight
June – St. John
July – Thomas
August – Hindle
September – Oakley
October – Johnson
November – Summerville
December – Barker & Richardson

We’ll see how far I actually get!

Second, I hope to tackle one or two of the brick walls that are currently standing in my way. Thomas Fee, Reuben Thomas, Harrison Haight and Robert Hunter have confounded me for years. I have a fair amount of information on each of them but not enough to carry their lines further back or to be positive about some of the information I do have. I hope that in the course of writing my mini-bios I will either come across new information, or forgotten details, or facts that now makes sense that didn’t previously. And, if not, I hope that I have time to dig around for fresh information.

Third, I have names and at least partial dates for all of my great-great grandparents. My final goal for 2011 will be to try and fill in what holes I have in my information for my them and try to take all my  branches back another generation for those great-great-great grandparents I don’t yet have details for. I expect that I will not fully achieve this goal due primarily to time limitations.

So, that is what I hope to accomplish in 2011. They are, on reflection, fairly lofty goals. Even if I only achieve a fraction of them, however, I will consider it time well spent.

Happy New Year! Best wishes to all for a happy and healthy 2011!