Marcia Crawford Philbrick, who blogs at Heartland Genealogy, reminded me that 2022 is already half gone and it is an excellent time to review my 2022 New Year’s genealogy goals.

Here is the short version of my 2022 goals:

1. Continue to give back to the genealogy community.

Mid-year progress: I’ve found a number of orphaned original photos for sale on line that I’ve bought and returned to descendants.

I’ve also started up my genealogy group – we met in May for the first time in 26 months – so I am back to teaching my friends all about genealogical research.

2. Continue to expand the family trees.

Given the dearth of records in the time periods in which I am researching, cracking through brick walls in any major way is unlikely. However, I really like Jacqi Stevens’s 12 Most Wanted for 22 plan on A Family Tapestry to focus on one family per month to see what new details can be uncovered about the life of that family.

Mid-year progress: I am enjoying my 12 for ’22 series and have made some interesting finds that help tell the life stories of my ancestors. I think the most surprising find was William Tarbox, who passed away in the Maine Insane Hospital in Augusta, after a 20 day stay.

3. Continue my genealogy education.

While I love one-off monthly webinars and will continue to attend many of them, I am going to focus more on selected conferences.

Mid-year progress: I’ve attended many live genealogy webinars, but have been more selective about the ones for which I register. This spring, I enrolled in my first class with the Applied Genealogy Institute, taking a 4 week online class on Advanced Swedish Research. I thoroughly enjoyed the small class setting and learned some new tips, tricks and resources. I even made one excellent find – a maiden name for my 6X great grandmother, Anna Stina (???), wife of Johan Caspersson Sandberg !

4. Clean up my source citations in RootsMagic using RM8.

Once I get going, I hope I will be motivated to keep at it since there won’t be any fun travel to disrupt my work!

Mid-year progress: This spring, the motivation hit me to get busy with this project. I actually decided to do the work in RootsMagic 7 since I am already familiar with the program. RootsMagic 8 is an entirely new animal.

I’ve broken it down into steps. I went through and compared my genealogy files on my PC to my usual backup files on a flash drive. That meant moving a few files, combining others into one file and adding a few images to either my PC or flash drive.

Of course, that mean broken links in RootsMagic. I’ve fixed all of them in my Sabo family tree and also ran Family Tree Analyzer (FTAnalyxer) to further check for errors/issues.

My FTAnalyzer list was quite short and most of it consisted of possible errors where the woman’s maiden name was the same as her husband’s. None of them were actually errors, though, because about a dozen cousins in my tree married each other. None were in my direct line.

I am now repeating the process to fix broken links in my Stufflebean family tree. My list is short except for my husband’s parents because I combined a couple of files for them and now have perhaps 200 broken links there to repair.

After I run FTAnalyzer on the Stufflebean tree, I will return to my tree and work on adding to my source citations, mostly using Cite Builder, and then adding the citations to the Person Notes in RootsMagic.

This process will probably take the rest of the summer, but when I finish, my final step will be to import gedcoms of both trees into RootsMagic 8.

I think this transition to RootsMagic 8 will be much easier when I am adding new bits of information in it instead of being overwhelmed by all the changes I am making and having to learn to navigate RM8 at the same time.

So, in summary, how am I doing with my 2022 genealogy resolutions?

I am thrilled that not only am I right on target, I won’t dread reviewing Goal #4 in six months and having to report that I did little with it. It will be off my “to do” list and I will be able to move on to bigger and better genealogical tasks.

Did you make any genealogy resolutions? Now is the time to review and share your accomplishments!