2021 has arrived and Randy Seaver has given us the first Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge of the new year:

1)  It’s the New Year, and many readers and bloggers have already made resolutions, or goals, or plans for one or more tasks or projects.  Or they haven’t yet, but could, or should.

2)  For this SNGF, please tell us what plans you’ve made, or what goals you’ve stated, or what resolutions you’ve averred for 2021.  Writing them down may help you achieve them.  Do one or more as you wish.

I reviewed my 2020 goals and added some for 2021 the other day, but I’ll expand a bit more.

1. Continue to give back to the genealogy community by finding homes for orphaned EBay vintage photos. As much as I love teaching and helping out at Sun City, with the pandemic still in full force, I won’t be doing any in-person genealogy anything for quite some time. I’ve already bought the first photo of the year on eBay and have found descendants.
2. Continue to clean up the people and work on source citations in RootsMagic 7. I am on a roll cleaning up my software so I am sticking with it. I use RootsMagic 7 and have decided to focus on cleaning up my source citations (which may or may not be with those darned templates). I’ve already cleaned out all the alternate names and entered all of my Female (MNU)s into one format. Next, I am cleaning out all the extraneous facts that RootsMagic generated. I have no idea how I did it, but sometimes a Residence fact is listed 3 or 4 times in the same census year and alternate names for a husband include the spouse’s name and vice versa. I prefer to enter my own facts. Given that I see no travel away from home in the foreseeable future (read that as at LEAST until Fall 2021 and perhaps not even then), I will roll with the mind numbing software tasks and stick with it! I will be very glad to sign off on Goal 2 in a year’s time.
3. Continue to work on brick walls in both family trees. I am really pleased with and inspired by my successes at revisiting long dormant research lines. Not only am I able to document new information, but my findings provide fodder for blog posts. A double win! I also have several lines, like Dave’s Zadock Jarvis family in Maryland and North Carolina and my John Thornton family in Rhode Island that I would like to firm up with more documentation. There are plenty of wild family trees out there that haven’t a chance of being correct, but we both have several lines where I see real possibilities for documenting earlier generations. I’ve been stymied for the moment because record collections I need to access are locked on FamilySearch.
4. Continue my genealogy education. I am sad that I won’t be at RootsTech 2021 in person this year – nor will anyone else since it is a virtual event – although I am an official ambassador again this year. However, there are many other conference opportunities and webinars available through which I can extend my genealogical knowledge and skills. NERGC, opening on 1 April 2021, is a new conference I am thinking about attending, as it is virtual this year. There are also a couple of state genealogical society conferences I would consider attending online. The genealogy dollars only go so far so my choices will be driven by the conference sessions and speakers.

Update on Goal #2 – I just signed up for the beta version of RootsMagic 8. We’ve all been waiting for it for almost 2 years. That means I have to decide whether to plod along in RM 7 and then update to RootsMagic 8 or deal with the learning curve, as there are MANY changes to RootsMagic.

I wish I could plan on visiting somewhere, anywhere, to work on genealogy, but even with the vaccine, I can’t see traveling any place in 2021. That will have to wait for my 2022 goals.

That’s it for me. These four goals will keep me very busy in 2021.