It’s been awhile since since I’ve done one of the 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy challenges. Challenge # 23 is to:
Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and then take the steps to accomplish it. Genealogy bloggers are encouraged to share their ideas and challenge their own readers.
This challenge runs from Saturday, 5 June 2010 through Friday, 11 June 2010.
How could I resist the opportunity to create my own challenge?
My challenge was easy to come up with, but first a little backstory to explain how I got here.
How many of you get a lot of email? Raise your hands. All of us, right? I’m blessed in that I get quite a few emails related to my genealogy from people who have found this website or found me on Ancestry or WorldConnect or any of the other places that my genealogy information resides, as well as from surname mailing lists that I belong to. I used to get so excited that I would drop whatever I was doing and start verifying the information and entering it into my database. However, at some point in time I decided to set up a separate folder for genealogy emails and just drop the correspondence in there to deal with later.
The only problem is that I haven’t been dealing with it. I’ve had this nagging feeling for several months that I should add processing a certain number of emails to my monthly to-do lists, but I haven’t done that yet. This weekend I opened my genealogy email folder and this is what I found.
I was shocked to see that I have emails in here going back to February 2008. 2008! That’s more than two years ago.
So, my challenge for this week is to process one email each day. That includes doing any due diligence necessary to verify the facts within and then adding the information to my genealogy database (all properly cited, of course). I handled the first one yesterday, which was easy, since, sometime in the last two years, I had determined that the person referenced was not part of my tree.
The ongoing part of this challenge is to continue processing one email a week (and to hold myself accountable by including this on my monthly to-do list), until this folder is empty.
If your genealogy emails have piled up, why don’t you join me in this challenge? Who knows what nuggets of information you might find.
This post was written as part of an occasional series called “52 Weeks to Better Genealogy” – a challenge created by Amy Coffin at WeTree. To see all my posts in the series, click here. To see how other folks have answered the challenge, check out Geneabloggers.com.