Genealogy Do-Over Week 4

This is week 4 of the Genealogy Do-Over 2015. Our two topics this week are managing projects/tasks and tracking searches.

Managing Project/Tasks:

I watched Thomas MacEntee's project management video and I like the format he uses.  It's no secret that I don't like spreadsheets. The spreadsheet that Thomas has provide for us is setup very closely to my own blog calendar. In my other life I was a travel agent. I kept track of my clients itineraries, tickets (issuing & delivery), deadlines for deposits or final payments etc. using a daily calendar. With that in mind, I am going to apply Thomas's project management techniques onto my calendar. I already use green for completed assignments, yellow for projects that have been started but not finished. I use red for projects that have titles but that I have not started to write about and I use turquoise for projects that the writing is completed but that I need to add photos, sources and/or documents to that post. I believe that this will work quite well for me. 

Evernote:

It seems that everyone uses Evernote so I thought I would check into it. I went to the Windows app store on my computer and downloaded Evernote. Then I started the process to sign up for an account. That is when I discovered that I already have an Evernote account, since 2010! I actually had notes in it as well. Judging from the dates on the notes that was about the time my laptop died and when I purchased a new laptop I did not reestablished Evernote on the new laptop. My loss.

I have been familiarizing myself with Evernote for a couple of days now.  I hope to have a better handle on it in a week or two. I have also found some video's on www.Youtube.com on how to create a calendar in Evernote so that is my project for this weekend. In the mean time I have created notebooks for my maternal lines and my children's paternal lines. I also copied all the sources I have used in my blog into their own notebook so that I can find them in a hurry. I have also created a research notebook for each family to keep track of my searches, notes, questions, sources and/or comments. Hopefully, with Evernote, I may be able to do away with pen and/or pencil and paper but until then I will continue to use my trusty pen!

Tracking Searches:

If you were to look at certain profiles in my master tree at www.ancestry.com you will find that I use their weblink function, a lot! It is where I store whatever sites that pertain to that person from Google, Bing, FamilySearch, Findagrave and other search engines. Unfortunately, the weblink function is missing elements such as adding a dates, notes or even a reminder to try the search again at a later date. I have been setting up alarms on my cell phone to recheck searches every quarter. I wonder if Evernote has some way of flagging or setting up a recurrent flag?

This is where learning Evernote will come in very handy for me, I hope! The way I envision using a research notebook for each family in Evernote is that I can make notes for each individual that will have the date of the search, which search engine used (ie. www.Familysearch.org), name of database (Tennessee Death Records, 1914-1955), URL link, complete source citation (then I will only have to cut and paste later), parameters of my search, results of my search, comments, questions and notes. These are the type of things I keep in my composition notebooks that I work from on a day to day basis. I feel like this way would serve me better time wise. 

Next Week:

In week 5 will be discussing building a Research Toolbox and citing sources. Interestingly enough the very first Legacy Family Tree webinar I took was one by Thomas MacEntee entitled Google for Genealogist which gave me the foundation for my own research toolbox. I am looking forward to seeing what Thomas will share with us next week.

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