Monday, March 5, 2012

Motivation Monday – Where Did February Go?


Public domain,
via Wikimedia.
My goodness, February flew by—even with an extra day, I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I had hoped. To review:

Client Research
  • Assisted on two heir search cases—one involving an Irish immigrant to the Los Angeles area and an ongoing heir search in the Midwestern U.S.

Personal Research and Organization
  • Using the Surname Saturday prompt, I blogged each week about one of my ancestors. In last month’s report, I commented that I thought I might not be able to continue at the rate of one ancestor per week. I’m still concerned about being able to maintain the pace. I am getting a little ahead on my posting so maybe my concerns aren’t warranted.
  • I managed to transcribe three documents for Amanuensis Monday postings and organized about a dozen other documents. I would like to pick up the pace here, so in March I plan to process a document a day! 

Writing
  • Continued weekly participation in Amy Coffin’s 52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy, although I was a little late on a couple posts!
  • I have been tracking my word count and in February I wrote 13,762 words for blog posts and Examiner articles. Plus I wrote another 22,406 words at 750words.com – a kind of daily brain dump!
  • I developed editorial calendars for my blogs and for Examiner.com to make sure that I am writing and posting on a regular basis on all.

Speaking

Education
  • Completed my time management assignments for ProGen; as part of this assignment, I developed a client list which includes everything I am working on with due dates and estimated hours to complete. I hope this will help keep me on task!
  • I participated in an excellent Legacy Family Tree webinar Ten Brick Wall Tips for Beginners presented by Marian Pierre-Louis.
  • The Legacy Genealogy Idol Competition (available free on Legacy’s website) was fun to watch. Some great tips were presented by competitors Elizabeth Clark, Marian Pierre-Louis, Michael Hait, and Elyse Doerflinger.
  • Thomas MacEntee of High-Definition Genealogy presented a great Introduction to GoToMeeting designed to give a behind-the-scenes look at one of the popular formats for presenting webinars. I’m scheduled to present a webinar later in the year so it was timely for me.
  • I’ve almost finished reading Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg, and still need to write the review of The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried and True Tactics for Researching Your Elusive Ancestors by Marsha Hoffman Rising. 

Giving Back
  • Signed up as a 1940 Ambassador but haven’t written any posts yet.
  • Signed up for indexing the 1940 census when available.
  • Created two memorials on FindAGrave for deceased family members, but did not get out to a cemetery to take photos.

Enough about February! I do find that writing these updates each month is helping keep me on track to reach my 2012 goals. On to March!



© 2012 Denise Spurlock, Ancestral Trees Research

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