New Year’s Resolution

This year I plan to write more diligently on my family history blog. At the end of the month, I will be traveling to RootsTech. One class in particular I plan to attend is Drew Smith’s Using a Blog as Your Online Research Log.

As I established goals for this 2012 New Year, I decided I would like to concentrate on breaking down some of my brick walls most of which occur around the beginning of the 19th century. But, in addition to the brick walls, bringing my ancestors to life using as many records as I can find, became an AHA moment while I was attending a genealogy conference. I needed to make them real people, flesh them out. People, and especially my ancestors are not just names, dates and places. They were real people whose decisions affect me and my descendants.

This morning, I was reading an article in Jan/Feb’s Family Chronicle by Bernice L. Rocque who has turned her research into stories which “[illuminate] the essence of ancestors who influenced the generations behind them…”.

While I don’t have the connections she has to older living relatives, I do have facts and could certainly work to find more. So as the New Year begins, I will try to put into words the facts I have learned about my ancestors. Maybe I will even try to record the first-hand knowledge I have about the ancestors I did get to know or learn about from the family stories I heard growing up.

My blog will become my research log but with more details.

Wish me well.