Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It’s Saturday Night again —
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.
1) How was your genealogy day?
Tell us about it — what genealogy-related activities did you do today, yesterday, or sometime this past week? Researching, summarizing, transcribing, analyzing, writing, organizing, scanning… anything counts!
Unlike Randy, I can’t give you an hour-by-hour summary of any genealogy day. However, I can describe what a fairly typical Saturday in my genealogy world looks like.
For the past couple of years, one of my genealogy goals has been to publicly share my research. In addition to maintaining a public tree, adding sources and memories to the FamilySearch tree, and updating profiles on WikiTree, I also share both my research and my research process here on this blog. Because I try to post something every day, I keep a calendar and schedule posts in advance. That means most of what I work on today won’t be published for a week or more.
The exception is my Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post, which is usually written on Saturday afternoon and scheduled for Sunday morning.
I tend to think of Saturday as my blogging day. Many Saturdays begin with reviewing my paper files, looking for items to feature in upcoming Monday’s Diggings or Friday Finds posts.
After that, I often work on content for my ABC Biography series, following Randy’s prompt. I start with a narrative report from RootsMagic for the selected ancestor. This part often turns into a bit of a “do-over,” because I usually discover errors or awkward wording in the sentences or citations that need to be corrected before I go any further.
Once the report is cleaned up, I use ChatGPT to help write a reader-friendly biography and draft the blog post. I also use ChatGPT to create song lyrics about the ancestor. From there, the process expands into several AI tools —
- Suno.com for the song
- Google NotebookLM for infographics and audio overviews
- Canva to create videos from the audio and images
- YouTube to host the finished videos for use in another blog post
By the time I finish creating the content for the ABC biography posts, it is usually around 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoon — which means Randy has posted the new Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge. So I switch gears and write this post for Sunday morning.
Unlike Randy, I rarely work late into the evening. I usually wrap up my genealogy and blogging sometime around 4 p.m., then shift to my volunteer role as the worship tech at our church, where I transfer the media files for Sunday worship to the church computer.
At 5 p.m., I join Church of the Resurrection online for worship, and after that the evening usually ends quietly — with a bowl of popcorn and whatever book I’m currently reading.
And that’s what a typical Saturday in my genealogy world looks like.