Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots
After more than a decade of writing Organize Your Family History, I’m writing today with mixed emotions to let you know that I’m retiring the blog and my Orderly Roots Guides. When I started this journey in 2012, I had no idea how many amazing genealogists I’d meet or how much joy I would find [ ] The post A heartfelt goodbye and thank you appeared first on Organize Your Family History .
November is over and it s time to fess up. How did your 30 x 30 challenge go? I d love to know whether you were able to put in 30 minutes a day and what you accomplished. And if you weren t able to do 30 minutes, did you do more than you might otherwise have done? [ ] The post November 2025 30 x 30 challenge wrap up appeared first on Organize Your Family History .
This Thursday is Thanksgiving for those of us who live in the U.S. I originally wrote this Thanksgiving post in 2016, and I like repeating it every year. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! I am grateful for you! This Thanksgiving week, I ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly [ ] The post Talk to your older relatives and create history for your descendants…
We re halfway through this month s 30 x 30 challenge and I d love to know how it s going. For those of you who are participating: have you been able to put in 30 minutes a day? Or have you averaged 30 minutes a day? Even if you haven t, have you found the challenge helpful? I had [ ] The post November 2025 30 x 30 challenge: Mid-month check in appeared first on Organize Your Family History .
I thought it might be fun to do a 30 x 30 challenge next month. If you participate, you commit to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research/organizing/whatever for 30 days in a row (i.e. the month of November). The rules of this challenge are very fluid. For example, you could decide that, for you, 30 [ ] The post Who s up for a 30 x 30 challenge? appeared first on Organize Your Family History .
I originally wrote this post in 2016 and nine years later I m amazed how little has changed about how I handle my electronic genealogy data. The only differences are that I m using a newer version of Reunion, I moved my research notes from Evernote to Apple s Notes app, and I use Backblaze, rather than CrashPlan [ ] The post How I store my genealogy data appeared first on Organize Your Family…
I wrote this post, which is one of the most-read posts on this blog (more than 31,000 views!), way back in 2013. It got a great response, so I thought I d run it again for newer readers. For me, being able to see at glance which documents I ve found (or need to find) for my [ ] The post My progress-tracking spreadsheet appeared first on Organize Your Family History .
Heads up: This is not genealogy related! I wanted to let you know that my co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and I have decided to restart the weekly podcast, Getting to Good Enough, that we hosted for five years from 2018 to 2023. At that time, we decided to shut it down because it had stopped being [ ] The post My podcast is coming back! appeared first on Organize Your Family History .