Typically, a New Year’s Resolution involves a goal that you intend to work toward in order to improve your life in the year ahead. Have you ever made a genealogy related New Year’s Resolution? If so, are you working on it, (or have you already given up that goal)?
In the time that I have been writing for the Genealogy blog at Families.com, I’ve made a couple of genealogy resolutions at the start of the year. So far, I have completely abandoned all hope of achieving each one of them rather quickly, and have yet to reach those goals (whatever they were). We are a few weeks into 2013, and this is the time when many people quit their New Year’s Resolutions.
You can look at that in more than one way. On the one hand, you can feel like a “quitter” for giving up your New Year’s Resolution so early in the year. On the other hand, you can realize that it is still very early in 2013 and you can easily pick up your genealogy resolution right where you stopped and continue working on it in the months ahead. So what if you took a brief hiatus? That’s ok!
It is important to make sure that you don’t pick a genealogy resolution for the new year that is bigger than you can possibly hope to achieve. I think this is what stopped my progress in previous years. Each year, I would decide that this would be the year where I put a ton of effort into creating my family tree. The reality is that I just don’t have the time to do it!
This year, I have selected an easier genealogy resolution. I intend to make an effort to stay in touch with (at least some of ) my family members. I live 2,000 miles away from them, so it isn’t like I can just walk over and knock on their doors.
I am continuing to send amusing greeting cards to one of my relatives. This isn’t always easy to do because he has a quirky sense of humor and most greeting cards are too “Hallmark” for his tastes. I have been making time to talk with my sister, and her new baby, through Skype, where we can all see each other as we talk. This isn’t super easy, either, because we are all trying to work around the erratic nap schedule her son currently insists upon.
What was your genealogy resolution for this year? If you haven’t made one yet, there is a blog you can check out that has some suggestions. Thomas MacEntee, a name many genealogists would recognize, has a blog called GeneaBloggers. He recently did an Open Topic post about Genealogy Resolutions for 2013.
Image by Jhon Alexander Calderón Sanmartín on Flickr