Genealogy Do-Over - Week 4: Managing Projects & Tasks and Tracking Searches

Genealogy Do-Over

A way to start your genealogy research over.
At the same time,  you will learn how to build a solid
family tree with good, strong roots.

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After taking last weekend and this past week off from genealogy, I’m now at Week 4 of my Genealogy Do-Over, and the topics for this week are 1) Managing Projects and 2) Tracking Searches.  I’m thinking that this post will be short and sweet, and not much prep work will be required to bring this into my research workflow.

Managing Projects and Tasks

I looked over the Project Management Template that Thomas MacEntee shared with us.  While quite impressive and detailed, I don’t have much of a use for it in my research workflow.  All of my Tasks and To Do’s will be kept and traced in OneNote.

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Tracking Searches

This was something that I have never done, and to be honest, never thought to do.  I think that I’ll actually find this quite helpful in my research workflow.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve search for the same information for a particular ancestor over, and over, and over again.  So much wasted research times online and in my local libraries.  As part of Week 3, I created a search log based on the Research Log workbook that Thomas shared with us.  When I started my research back up, I made a point to adding all the search parameters I did to the log.  Now all I have to do is review it each times I start to research, and I’ll know immediately where I left off.

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Well, that’s it for Week 4.  I told you it would be short and sweet.  Now I’m off to review the handout for Week 5, which includes 1) Building a Research Toolbox and 2) Citing Sources.