Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Genealogy Activity Have You Spent Time On?

We are half way through 2022 already and now are in the first weekend of July with Independence Day almost here.

Today’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge has nothing to do with the holiday, but more with how we are spending our genealogy hours in the dog days of summer.

Here is Randy Seaver’s newest challenge:

1)  I am completely out of ideas for this week – and am late in posting.  What genealogy activity have you spent time on this week?

My time this week is actually part of my summer project – to clean up links in RootsMagic – broken by none other than myself when I moved some folders around and consolidated some files. It had to be done and it hasn’t been horribly bad going through the family tree.

I also got a bit sidetracked this week going down the rabbit hole collecting all the missing census images for the direct lines in the family tree. That’s completed!

It took me awhile, but I finally figured out where to find a list of the broken links in RootsMagic 7. It’s not actually a list of broken links, it’s a 360 page Multimedia List for my tree and a 490 page list for my husband’s tree.

I’ve created a paper list of all the people who have [NOT FOUND] after an entry. Considering that I have about 8000 people in my tree, the list isn’t really very long. Plus, some people in the list are sharing one record – like a marriage record – so when I fix the first person and link the second one to the image, I’ve actually finished 2 people at once.

I’ll repeat this process for my husband’s tree  and that will take care of all the broken links.

My final step will be to work on citing the sources. I think I’ve about given up on the templates, so sources are recorded in one of two ways – either in the Person Notes or in the way I’ve named the image of the record itself. For example, a record that is found on FamilySearch will be named: SurnameFirstName.TypeofRecord.Year + place of event with book and page (if it is a paged source) plus the FS film number and the image number.

That will take quite a bit of time to complete, but I’ll be using Cite Builder to create my citations for the Person Notes.

That’s what I’ve been busy doing this week – in between the monsoon rains, which have started early this year. Usually, the first rain doesn’t happen until after the 4th of July. We’ve had two sprinkly showers plus a good rainfall since monsoon season began on 15 June.

We also have thunder right now, plus rain falling around us and some black clouds overhead so we may get more rain today. I am sure the animals and plants (even the cactus) are happy since it has hardly rained at all since last summer.

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s challenge.

3 thoughts on “Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Genealogy Activity Have You Spent Time On?”

  1. That is the reason I have no images linked to my RootsMagic database. I could never leave files or folders alone. But I admire those who can!

  2. I ran into the same problem years ago with broken media links in Legacy years age. Like Lisa, I can’t stop fiddling with my file folders. Starting this year, I have been recording my media in a spreadsheet by assigning a unique ID number by record type (ex. CN10001 = census, DIR10001 = directory). The ID number is entered into the Legacy 9 source detail File ID field. It is also appended to the image file name and in the “short title” field in Zotero.

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