Welcome to the new genealogy year, everyone! With the start of 2025 comes our first Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge with Randy Seaver. It’s simple and to the point:

1)  What are your genealogy goals for 2025?  Consider genealogy research, education, organizing, service, writing, and whatever else you care to share.

I’d previously shared my new goals in my 2024 review/2025 new expectations, but I’m also informally expanding my short list:

Goal #1 is to attack my software cleanup month by month, beginning with Generation 5. Completing the really early generations shouldn’t be too hard because most of my data on those ancestors come from one or two scholarly articles covering the family. No birth, marriage and death certificates for people born in the 1400s!

Goal #2 will definitely be to continue my “12 for” series with 12 for ’25. Jacqi Stevens, from whom I got this inspiration, carefully chooses her monthly candidates at the beginning of the year. I prefer to choose as I go along – just in case a new discovery sends me down a rabbit hole!

Goal #3 – I need to again beef up the number of comments I leave on other’s genealogy blog posts. Everyone loves feedback.

Goal #4 – This goal is very specialized. A second cousin asked for help researching the side of his family that we don’t share. I’m going to devote some time in January to working on those lines.

My fifth “informal” goal was to go through my archival albums and get rid of some remaining old paper copies I had of records – none original, Just printouts of Scandinavian records I found on Genline and in some other online repositories. Those papers were already fading and I have nice digital images of all of them anyway. That’s done and it took me very little time.

My sixth “informal” goal is to add to my color-coded list of DNA matches that I started a couple of years ago in Excel. I only have 2 first cousins and know most of my second cousins. I have very few third cousins in my DNA match list. Most are 4th, 5th or distant cousins and a number of those have one person in a tree, if any tree at all, and I don’t waste time with them. If they match in a ThruLine, or better yet, a a Theory of Family Relativity, I am noting who they are, shared cMs, website where I found them and if they have trees.

The problem with my DNA matches is that the only ones that have any kind of hints to help be break through a brick wall are to “people” (and I use the term loosely) that I am finding don’t even exist. For example, one such non-person is a Lieutenant John Stark, supposedly the father of my Catherine (MNU) Carlisle, wife of a Loyalist. He supposedly fought in the Revolutionary War, as a patriot, but I can’t prove anything about a family for him. One person who links to him is actually descended from General John Stark of New Hampshire, who is a very real person and a patriot. However, my Catherine most definitely is not his child. And so it goes.

That’s it for my 2025 goals.