Prompt:  Goals. Not just for resolutions anymore. Write down your genealogy goals. Then you can look back and see what you’ve accomplished.

Back in December, I made my genealogy-related New Year’s Resolutions, which are as follows:

  • Accept that try as I might, I cannot always find the answer.
  • Learn more about the lives of my ancestors, focusing more on the how and why, not just the who, what, when, and where.
  • Blog more, by sharing my ancestors’ stories and helping fellow family historians.
  • Transcribe more records than I did in 2008.
  • Make a decision as to what level I want to take genealogy to (the family historian? a professional? another direction?) and make a plan for how to get there.

These are very general, and over the last few months, I have developed more specific goals that I am now focusing on.  Here’s what I plan to work on and hope to accomplish by the end of the year:

Implement a website devoted to my family tree.  While Ancestry’s public/private trees a wonderful, it’s not very easy to update them; you have to upload a new one and delete the old one.  If I had a public tree, this would not be so much of an issue, but with a private tree, I have to go back and re-invite people to give them access to the new updated tree.  With my own site, I can maintain access myself and update as needed.

With my recent admission into the DAR, I’ve already started to involve myself in some volunteer projects.  One in particular deals with inputting application data into a database.  You download ten applications at a time.  I figure if I can do ten a week, I will have completed 340 application entries by the end of the year.  As much as I’d love to devote all of my time to my research, I feel it’s important to help others as well, and this is one way to do it.

Also DAR-related, is proving another ancestor’s service.  I originally tried to go in under Joseph PARKS, my seventh great-grandfather, but they are now questioning his service.  Instead of having me prove it, they had me go in under his son, Robert (my sixth great-grandfather), who’s service was proven.  So one of my new goals is to prove Joseph’s service.  I hope to complete this by the end of the year, but realize this one might take more time.

There you have it.  Three of my major goals for this year.