Here we are at the last day in the month of January. It’s been 31 days since this brand new year began. How have you been doing with your genealogy related new year’s resolutions? Are you working hard on them, or have you forgotten all about them?
The dawn of a new year is something that causes many people to take stock of their lives, and decide upon a few changes that they would like to make that would improve their lives in the coming year. Often, these changes are health related, but it’s not unusual for people to make resolutions to put more effort into working on their favorite hobby. Perhaps you are among the people who made a genealogy related New Year’s resolution that you had every intention of putting your very best effort into this year.
This year, I made my first ever genealogy related new year’s resolutions. I planned on finally taking the time to go through a box of photos from when my husband and I moved from Illinois to California, and putting them into a scrapbook. I really like how scrapbooks tell family stories, and have been meaning to tell that story through photos, small scraps of “souvenirs”, and fond memories, ever since we arrived in California several years ago.
My other genealogy related New Year’s resolution was to make a serious attempt at putting together my family tree. I’ve attempted to get started with that many times in the past, and have always gotten overwhelmed by the amount of work that I think it is going to require. I was hoping that by making genealogy related New Year’s resolutions, I would be motivated to really get a good start on at least one of these projects.
How did I do? To be quite honest, I haven’t even started either one of these projects yet. It’s been an entire month, and I have put exactly zero effort into these two resolutions. January has proved to be an extremely busy month for me. I have spent a lot of time working. I have taken on a new podcasting project (podcasting is my favorite hobby), which I’ve been very excited about. I’ve had some days where I was just too sick to want to do anything other than sleep all day, and even the thought of starting those genealogy projects was exhausting all by itself. In other words, I had every excuse that one could think of for not doing my New Year’s resolutions.
Did your genealogy resolutions work out better than mine did? I hope so! If not, there is still another chance. The Chinese New Year starts on February 3, 2011. Traditionally, New Year’s resolutions are made on December 31 of the old year, right before the new calendar year starts. However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot use Chinese New Year as a reason to try again on those neglected genealogy goals.
Image by Bert Kimura on Flickr