May is moving right along. I can’t believe it’s already the middle of the month. Randy Seaver has a new Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge for us and it’s all about us this week:

1) Did you have good genealogy fun this past week?  Did you add to your family Tree?  Did you make a great discovery?  Did you try something new?  Did you make family history?

I’d have to say I had fun simply because our five-month-long project painting, updating and redecorating some of the house finally came to a close last week.

It definitely interfered with my genealogy fun so far this year, both in the hours it took and how tired it made me since I painted a huge portion of the inside of our house!

However, the house is now fully repainted inside, the furniture moving is complete, the carpet has been washed and the windows are sparkling clean.

This is the first week that I’ve had any real time to get back to genealogy research. I didn’t add to the family tree, didn’t make a big discovery or create family history.

I decided to return to an activity I started months ago and about which I was very excited – reviewing not-so-ancient ancestors using FamilySearch full-text search.

I’m actually quite amazed at all the details and tidbits of information I’ve learned that I never would have found without their search (still beta) function.

I’m not going to share any of my finds as I’ll be writing about them in future blog posts!

I also delved into NotebookLM and shared what I learned with the genealogy group I teach each month. The function that was everybody’s favorite, by far, was the ability to upload an unindexed digital book and have AI create a list of surnames or places of interest. For all those huge unindexed county histories, NotebookLM is fabulous!

Thank you, Randy, for a fun challenge this week.