Be it resolved...

"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." – Rainier Maria Rilke

I am a list maker... there I've admitted it. I love lists. I love making them and I love crossing things off. That's one of the big reasons I love New Year's. I look forward to making resolutions because a) it involves a list and b) mine are generally things I really want to do, not things I should do, if you know what I mean. The past couple of years have been a bit hectic so I wanted to sit down and really think about what I would like to accomplish this year and make it so!

So what do I hope to do this year, genealogically-speaking?

I am going to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City next month, my first visit in over 6 years. I am busy making lists (more lists!) of what I want to research while I am there. Keeping that momentum going is first on my list!

I made a major leap over a brick wall last summer with the discovery of the court record documenting my great-great-great-great grandparents' divorce in 1846. I want to continue to explore leads relating to Mariam Williams Kirkendoll and her daughter, Caroline Kirkendoll, who seem to have disappeared following the divorce.

A project I've long wanted to get to and now have the necessary technology to accomplish is to scan and transcribe the typewritten memoirs of my great-great grandmother, Christina Belle Shultz Younker. Her recollections are rich with detail, exaggeration, omission and all the elements of a great story and I'd like to make it accessible on the web for others to read.  

Related to Miriam above, it's time to reexamine my other brick walls, write up what I currently know and develop a research plan. One which may involve turning certain aspects over to a professional.

My stalwart website dedicated to Luxembourg-American Genealogy Research, FamiLux, is long overdue for an overhaul and to be brought into the 21st century. Now that so much information is so easily accessible through web searching, refining my scope and focusing more on research strategies is something I am looking forward to far more than checking dead links, which has been taking up most of my web site time up until now.

On the topic of sharing more of my successes, I am also looking forward to blogging about more of my research in short vignettes to pass information along to distant cousins but also as a means to reconnect with what I know, how I know it and what I wish I knew.

Finally, a couple of eminently practical tasks I want to tackle this year:

It's time to review all of my backup schedules, clean up my Dropbox, Google Docs, and other cloud files. I want to spend some time refining my naming conventions for files and getting my digital genealogy organized, labeled and accessible.

A surprise end-of-the-year announcement from Ancestry means that I will also need to spend some time exploring alternatives to Family Tree Maker this year. Back in the olden days, I loved PAF. FTM has been a serviceable program through the years, but now it's time to up the ante and seek out a more robust program better equipped for where I want to take my research in the future.

There are a myriad of posts about making genealogy resolutions just like mine and I read through quite a few for inspiration as well as reality checks. A couple that stand out are Organizing Your Genealogy Research for its pragmatic suggestions. And I enjoyed two from Colonial Roots, Five Resolutions for Genealogy and Five More Genealogy Resolutions for their reminders to get back to applying your best practices to your research.

What's on your list this year?