Goals for the New Year

In 2010, I hope to accomplish the following:

• Interview my grandmothers, parents and great aunts, uncles and cousins on video ASAP!
• Goal is to do this by the end of February for my grandmothers
• Update each of my lines sideways and forward.
• I usually do well with my information about my ancestors siblings, but I have not done so well finding cousins in more recent generations.
• Focus my search for my German lines so that I can visit their hometowns while I am in Germany for 4 1/2 months
• I will therefore focus on the Eichhorn, Gresz, Fink, Weiss and Tross lines for the next two months
• Stay in touch with my relatives searching my fathers side of the family.
• I research my mothers side as I have great aunts and uncles who research my fathers.  I will be helping my Aunt Dottie with her search in Poland for the Karpinski's (my great-grandmother's line)
• Complete Dear Myrtle's finally get organization checklist from 2009
• Start researching my fiancé's line (at the very least, get the information he knows into my file)
• Blog: Participate in Surname Saturday each week in order to get my surnames out there and find new cousins!  I plan on going alphabetically though all my surnames.

Source time

Following month two of the DearMYRTLE organization checklist, it is time to make sure all of the items I have are properly sourced in my genealogy program.  I have been doing pretty well, but I need to go back through and make sure I have all the father and mother relation filled in for Legacy, as well as citing the information I received from interviews.  I also have to better use the notes section, both for transcribing and my views of some of the information.

I am very well aware of the necessity of sources, due to a couple documents I have that were not sourced and have created some problems for me.

The first of these is a pedigree chart my grandfather created, which I will talk about further as soon as I buy a scanner and can attach images of all the documents he had.

The second is a document created by Estella Nuwer Minderler on December 8, 1974.  Estella is my second cousin, four times removed on my father's mother's side.  Titled "The History of the Nuwers.", I was given a copy of this in elementary school by my grandmother when I was doing a family history project.  

It begins, on page 3, with a "Narrative" as follows:

"Beginning in the 1840's and continuing for the next thirty years, millions of Europeans emigrated to the United States and Canada.  The Nuwers of Alsace-Lorraine were an early part of this movement."

It continues with information on the town of Lancaster, Erie County, New York where they settled, biographical information on several of the people listed and a list of descendants of Anthony and Margarete (Ludwig) Nuwer (my 5th great-grandparents).

This is a wonderful item to have, as the information on the later generations is taken first hand from interviews Estella did.  Unfortunately, none of it is documented and the later generations do not completely match up with research that has been done in more recent years.  The most depressing part of this is that Estella mentions an immigrant relative Christine Nuwer who kept a diary of her trip across the Atlantic.  It is depressing because there never was a Christine Nuwer and no one can locate the diary, to find out who had actually written it.  Further discussion on the diary can be found by Brian Smith.

I want to make sure that all information I write and that gets passed on to other researchers and further generations is correct and documented as such, so that they do not have to redo the work I have already done.  This will probably mean very little new research in February, which will be okay as I am waiting for quite a few New York vital records and my great-grandfather's WWI military records.

Source:

"The History of the Nuwers."  Estella Nuwer Minderler, 8 Dec 1974; privately held by Amanda Acquard, [STREET ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE].

FamilySearch Indexing

I have been following DearMYRTLE's "Finally Get Organized" January 2009 checklist.  All of my papers in plastic sheet protectors and binders, so I went to the next step today and did my first extracting with FamilySeach Indexing.

It was much easier than I had anticipated, though I'm glad that there are two people indexing each page, just in case (some of the writing was a bit difficult to decipher).  I should be able to do this Thursday nights while watching Dear Betty.  It will be good practice for both transcribing records properly and deciphering different handwriting styles.  Besides, a little good genealogy karma never hurt anyone;-)