2023 Goal Review

Do you set goals for your genealogy research? Several years ago, I started setting annual goals and have to admit those goals have helped me keep focused. That was until I hit 2023. Looking back, I think I either had overly ambitious goals or poorly focused goals. Below are the goals I posted on 1 Jan 2023:

• Continue to use the TreeShare feature of RootsMagic to upload people, events and sources to my Ancestry tree.
• Go thru my grandparents thru my 3rd great grandparents and make sure that any unique sources, photos or documents that I have are uploaded to FamilySearch.
• Compare a narrative report for grandparents thru my 3rd great grandparents to the profile on WikiTree and add any additional information and sources to the WikiTree profile.
• Fill in the ‘blanks’ on my family tree on WikiTree by linking to existing profiles – OR – Create a profile on WikiTree for any of my ancestors that do not exist
• Update the research of my 4th great grandparents, including their profiles on FamilySearch and WikiTree.
• Create a free-space page on WikiTree to ‘catalog’ the Crawford related blog posts to share with the Crawford Name Study

2023 Goals posted on Heartland Genealogy on 1 Jan 2023 – https://heartlandgenealogy.org/2023/01/01/2023-goals/

So, how did I do?

• Well, using TreeShare has become a habit. I’m not even sure why I included it as a goal.
• When it comes to updating my portion of the FamilySearch tree, I’d have to give myself a C for effort. I did upload many of the family photos that were handed down to me by my grandparents. When it comes to updating sources, I was fairly successful with generations closer to me. However, I did not get this accomplished thru my 3rd great grandparents.
• While I continued to learn how to use WikiTree, I also updated the profiles of my 2nd great grandparents. I have some of my 3rd great grandparents updated, but not all.
• Even though I worked to update my research of my 4th great grandparents, I was not able to publish narrative reports for all of them. While this research has been shared on Ancestry and on my blog, I have not updated FamilySearch or WikiTree for these ancestral couples. Thus, it is a work in progress.

• My use of WikiTree Spaces to create an index of my blog posts is almost complete. I just need to finish indexing 2022 and 2023.

To help me keep track of my research progress, I’m going to use fan charts for my grandparents to records tasks.

Besides the three versions pictured above, I have a chart to record the number of Ancestry ThruLines I’ve added to my RootsMagic file, the number of sources on a FamilySearch profile and the number of memories attached to a FamilySearch Profile.

Since all of these fan charts were ‘created’ in late December 2023, they will help me measure my research progress.

Even though I can’t mark any of my 2023 goals off as completed, I feel like I’ve had a productive year. How about you? Did you complete your 2023 genealogy goals?