Genealogy Recap 2021, Genealogy Goals 2022

Do you set goals for your family history?

As 2021 is now over and today is the first day of 2022, I thought this would be the perfect day to recap last year and set goals for next year. My friend, Julie Cahill Tarr, recently posted about her 2022 goals and she inspired me to do the same.

 

My 2021 Genealogy Review

This is hard for me because I have been fortunate to be involved in many activities, but I can at least, share some highlights. Let’s see:

1. With my pal, Renate Yarborough Sanders, we had a successful 2nd season of our YouTube show/Zoom meetings for Let’s Talk North Carolina Genealogy. I think I can speak for both of us in saying that we’ve felt even more connected to the community we have conversations with when it comes to the topics on the show and about researching family history in North Carolina. Not only that, we were honored to be interviewed by Janice Gilyard and Cherekana Feliciano for their Speak On It! BlogTalk Radio series in September, and in November, we were awarded a Certificate of Appreciation from the North Carolina Genealogical Society.!
2. In February, I spoke at RootsTech for the first time! I participated as part of a special booth run by FamilySearch about genealogy goodwill projects and had the opportunity to share with more than 200 people, my vision for a crowdsourcing approach to indexing historical newspapers. It was fantastic! That project is progressing, with our pilot on Tennessee newspapers now underway. Our goal is to enlist hundreds of volunteers, so if you are interested in participating, sign up for the email list so you can get updates! I am participating in RootsTech Connect 2022 also, so stay tuned for future announcements.
3. I am President of the Nashville Chapter of the Afro-American & Genealogical Historical Society and we won the 2021 Chapter of the Year Award from our National organization – wow! We have had an enriching year of programs and activities and our membership has grown too. 2022 will be my last year as President but we have a fantastic Executive Board and we are busy planning for the future.
4. I started a volunteer position with the National Genealogical Society on the Delegate Council Steering Committee and have enjoyed helping to develop a framework for the Delegate Council and aiding with the 2021-2022 quarterly workshops. I’ve connected with many other genealogists and learned more about some of the goals and challenges of genealogy societies across the country.
5. I was elected as Representative-at-Large for the USGenWeb Project and if you have been following me for awhile, you may know that the USGenWeb Project is near and dear to my heart. It was through the USGenWeb Project that I started my genealogy volunteership and it’s been important to me over these years to continue and give back. Connie Knox of GenealogyTV interviewed me about the USGenWeb Project in March and I glad to be a national representative!
6. My Academy of Legacy Leaders™ Facebook group for family history enthusiasts has grown too! I started the group in January 2020 and by the end of that year, we had 500 members. Now, as we start 2022, we have more than 1550 members and I am so thankful! The conversations and sharing that goes on in the group is inspiring and I do my best to provide education and value. I’ve taken a specific focus to help others with their organizing of photos and media documents (not just family history-related ones too) and enjoy the connections. I welcome you to join the group if you enjoy conversations about your family history! I also have an email newsletter and invite you to sign up.

In addition to these highlights, I’ve done much more – from presentations to genealogy groups & societies, collaboration with historical project partnerships, been interviewed for podcasts, online shows, and documentary — and started creating TikTok videos & Instagram Reels. Whew! Visit my “About Me” page for more details.

 

My 2022 Genealogy Goals

As you can see, I have a lot on my plate, so… where do I want to focus in 2022? Well, genealogy is not the only thing I do with my time. I have a family and enjoy being with them, of course. In fact, hubby and I moved to Tampa, Florida in late October with our youngest. We lived in Nashville, TN for 20 years and this has been a major life transition – but a good one! We are now so very close to my mom, stepfather, and uncle and how can we complain about the weather & scenery here? Well – we may have to dodge a hurricane or two in the future LOL.

Given all that we have going on, I divide my life into 4 sectors: Home Life, Family Initiatives, Genealogy, and Work Life.

I have goals in all 4 sectors.

I won’t share all of my goals, but let me briefly describe the sectors.

• The “Home Life” category is pretty self-explanatory – it includes all the things needed for our family and home needs.
• The “Family Initiatives” category is for 3 specific things – my Academy of Legacy Leaders™ initiative – including growing my efforts to support family history enthusiasts with digital memories organization using FOREVER, my husband’s Community Shutterbug photography work, and our daughter’s Instagram shop where she will start to sell her crochet creations. We want to be very intentional in building these, so I separated them out into their own category.
• “Work Life” is self-explanatory also. I enjoy an extremely active full-time career as a knowledge management information scientist at a major academic medical center and there are many projects and responsibilities in which I am involved.

And then there is my “Genealogy” category — in which I have many projects to tend to.  For this post though, I will focus on the Genealogy category.  What are my 2022 goals?

Here are 4 highlights:

1. Start a “program” (not the best word) to regularly send family history information to my family and extended family. Sure, social media plays a large part in how many of us share our work with family members, but I am developing a plan for a more direct and sustainable path for family history sharing in smaller “chunks.”  I won’t lie – the thought of doing a book seems insurmountable to me, so just like how this blog post has provided an outlet for me to share with family at a smaller scale over time, my new “program” will do something similar. I plan to ramp this up in 2022 and get the information into the physical possession of more family members. Are you intrigued? LOL
2. Surname projects – I have two projects that focus on the genealogies of anyone with the last name of “Koonce” and the last name of “Vanderbilt” (I am obsessed with the Vanderbilt family).  I have websites for them set up through the Guild of One-Name Studies and also, new blogs. Thus, I would like to more regularly, work on the surname projects and more formally connect with those that I communicate with through those outlets.
3. Historical Newspaper Indexing – this is the project I mentioned above and that my RootsTech Connect presentations are about. I have already partnered with my pal, Billie McNamara, to bring our Tennessee project to fruition and want to expand to other states beyond that. Next on my sights is North Carolina and the crowdsourcing platform we are using, FromThePage, is going to be critical to this growth.
4. Create my genealogy content hub — over the past 16 years, I’ve done many blog posts, social media posts, presentations, publications, etc. and I am in the process of organizing all of this material into a content “hub.” Much like I espouse the importance of having a “hub” for your family photos & memories, I am now doing this for the content I create. Organizing it all will help me be more streamlined in my future genealogy work. Plus, not only will my “hub” help me organize my genealogy content, but I am also extending it to help me organize my entire life across all 4 sectors described above. This is what Tiago Forte describes as “Building a Second Brain.” My 2nd Brain is digital and it’s already showing to be immensely helpful in keeping me on track.

I have more goals than just these, but I don’t want to tire you out – ha ha! I tire myself out just writing about them! 2022 is getting off to a strong start as well as I already have several workshops & presentations in this first quarter – including 1) a guest speaker spot in Robyn Smith’s “Organizing Your Genealogy” workshop on January 30th, 2022, 2) serving as the virtual emcee for the 2nd annual FOREVER Family History Virtual Event in February 2022, and 3) being a panel participant for a RootsTech Connect 2022 session in  March 2022.

Tell me about your goals for 2022?

 

 

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