A Year Gone By :: in Review

Well, the year .. is almost history. It's been a great year for me for research, though not so much for blogging. With only 112 posts published, it's been the "worst" year since I started blogging. In fact, this is my first post for December! No excuses, really, but what I've "discovered" is that when I get involved with a project (be it actual research, transcribing documents, or simply standardizing my database) I tend to get really involved - to the point of doing little else until "that project" is completed. I must admit, I have missed the blogging...



January found me traveling westward from Louisiana where I had spent the holidays with extended family. Highlights for the month were a short stop at White Sands National Monument, a meetup with a blog reader who turned out to be a distant cousin, a two-week stay at Lake Havasu City where there was a hot-air balloon festival and where I developed a naming scheme for organizing my digital files.






An Arizona Sunset. January 12th.


February was spent in Salt Lake City where RootsTech was on the agenda. I must admit, I was a little disappointed with the conference but enjoyed seeing old friends again. Of course, there was The Library that was calling my name for the entire month! Among other things while there, I began writing the series on the Hoffman-Huffman family of Ohio and Pennsylvania.



After a few days in Death Valley I made one final stop before heading back to Indiana in March. May came all too quickly along with the NGS Conference in Cincinnati, which was absolutely fantastic. The sessions were (for the most part) outstanding, and being with like-minded friends was priceless.






The Grand Canyon looking north from Desert View. March 15th.


A short sojourn into Kentucky looking for the land of my Bray ancestors, then it was back to Indiana for a few more weeks. In early July I was notified that a seat had opened up in Thomas Jones' class at the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh - I had been put on the waiting list in February when I was unsuccessful in registering - and was asked if I was still interested in attending. Of course, my response was a definite "Yes!" and I was shortly on my way to G.R.I.P. and what a "trip" it was - one of the most challenging yet exhilarating experiences of my genealogy journey!



I had thought that I might spend a week in Pennsylvania doing on-site research but after a week at G.R.I.P. my brain was fried. Instead, I returned to Indiana for a few weeks to assimilate what I had learned and to prepare a bit more to research those Pennsylvania Ancestors.



In August I spent about 10 days in Huntsville, Alabama helping a cousin who was recovering from surgery. While there, plans were made with another cousin for spending a few weeks in Maine. A couple days of research in Pennsylvania on the way there, a few more days afterward, a visit with my aunt and cousin in Maryland, then a few more days in Pennsylvania and I made it back to Indiana just in time for the Midwest Geneabloggers .. Fall Meetup (link to Tina Lyons' post) on October 13th.






Northern Maine. September 25th.


Since then I've been looking for more Hoffman and Switzer and Rupert descendants, and found quite a few of them too! But most of the last month has been spent on "cleaning up" and standardizing my genealogy database in preparation for uploading it to ancestry.com or some other online tree site. It's been somewhat tedious and very time consuming. Sources still require a great deal of work and I'm beginning to think that this "clean-up" work could go on for ever!



It has been an interesting and rather satisfying year. A mixture of travel and research and a little of both combined. What could be better?