Wisdom Wednesday - Jump Right In!

I've found it a bit daunting to decide to return to blogging but I have been thinking about it quite a lot recently.

As part of my 2013 goal to be more organised I've been trying to follow some of the babysteps from the FlyLady which is mainly related to running a home, decluttering, organisation etc but I have taken one of her philosophies and applied it to blogging.

The FlyLady sends me emails throughout the day with hints about routines and tips and at the end of each one she says

"You are not behind! I don't want you to try to catch up; I just want you to jump in where we are. O.K.?"

And that is exactly what I've decided to do. 

When I discovered Geneabloggers.com (how I haven't found it before now I don't know!!) I saw the daily prompt as my way to get back on the blogging wagon and that is how I've ended up here with my Wisdom Wednesday post.
 
I've stopped procrastinating about planning all the content, social media, connections, comments etc etc etc....  

Hopefully this will get picked up and I hope I've got the right sort of "Wisdom" but here goes.

So let's stop procrastination and JUMP RIGHT IN!

September Update

I'm starting a Pharos course this week about organising - it's only 3 weeks long but I'm looking forward to it. I thought I would try a short course first to see how it all works and if it will fit in with our hectic family life. It is all online and has a forum and a weekly chat session. This course appealed to me as I'm hoping it will provide me with some useful tools for both my one name study and my own research.

I received the FlatCapsandBonnets CD promptly after ordering it and it was good -lots of searchable pdf's of books. I would recommend taking a look and for less than £5 it does provide a useful resource.

My father-in-law scanned in some old photos from his collection. So now I have some cool old photos of my husband's Gt Grandfather's (Charles William TILLIN) wedding. There is a family story that his Gt Grandmother (Ada Mary HERON) was jewish but I don't have any proof of this. All of the family were baptised in the local parish churches so I'm not sure if this will turn out to be a bit of a family myth.

Here are the happy couple surrounded by friends and family in 1917 in Streatham.

WDYTYA Live 2011

So, after a bit of a break I'm back! Genealogy has taken a bit of a back seat over the last few months with the arrival of my 3rd child. Anyway I managed to get a ticket for Who Do You Think You Are Live at Olympia last weekend and spent a few hours of child free family tree time.

The night before I had taken a good look at the WDYTYA Live website and decided on the stands I wanted to visit. I knew that I had a short time scale as I was due to meet friends for lunch in central London so I wanted to make the most of my time.

I arrived at Olympia on Saturday 26th February at 9.30am and trooped off the underground with everyone else straight into the end of a queue. The queue seemed long but was constantly moving and within 5 minutes I had got through the front door. This was the point where my research came in handy - I immediately headed upstairs to pick up some tickets for a talk at 11am. But, the queue was long and I didn't want to waste any time and I knew from a previous visit that I would be able to stand at the back and listen so I headed off to the military area.

We have a ROBBINS ancestor who was part of the Royal Garrison Artillery in Gibraltar so I chatted to a guy on the Royal Artillery Museum stand. I bought a couple of books to provide a bit of background and a booklet about tracing military ancestors.

As it was still early I spent 5 minutes chatting to a guy on the PRONI stand and we worked out that to continue tracing my GUTHRIE roots there may be some estate management papers in the archives. So maybe one day I'll be able to go to Belfast and investigate that further.

Then it was off to the Guild of One Name Studies. I have been a member for a couple of years but after speaking with Corinne I took the plunge and registered my TILLIN one name study. I will let you know when my profile page is up and running.

Next door was the North of Ireland Family History Society which I joined as an associate member - I'm looking forward to their bi-annual publication and possibly doing a bit of research in Coleraine when I'm over there in August.

After a quick pause for a drink, I stopped at the Berkshire Family History Society where we found some TILLINs on their Marriage and Burial Indices. I didn't buy the CDs but I'm considering it as I know that the bulk of my TILLINs are from this county.

Finally I listened to the talk by D. Josh Taylor on organising. I missed the first 10 minutes but the part that I heard was really useful. I'm hoping to get hold of the handouts from the website at some point as there was quite a lot to take in.

And with that it was time to head off into Central London. I'd had a quick genealogy fix and enjoyed chatting with everyone. I think I'm getting braver and found that actually speaking to people made the WDYTYA experience much more fun. I also have 3 areas to focus my research on for the next few months which will hopefully stop me going off on too many tangents!

Data Backup Day

Yesterday was the first of the month and should have been data backup day!!

Thanks to Elyse for reminding me - I've now copied all my files to our lovely new hard drive so I can feel happy that everything is backed up for another month!!

1st of the Month - Data back up done!

So, following the advice of many different blogs I've made a copy of all my genealogical data.

I'm going to back up this blog at the end of this post.

For next month I'm going to have a look at some of the online backup/storage solutions and see which one might work for me.

Organising, organising and more organising...

Today has been an organising day! (Inbetween the usual daily chores and looking after the baby of course!)

I now know what I've got, what I haven't got, printed copies of documents I only had on the pc and added another list of things to find to my to do list. I've also created a mini folder with summary info to take with me to Who Do You Think You Are Live at the weekend.

But there is definitely something satisfying looking at a nice clean folder with everything filed away.

All I need now is someone to ask me a question so that I can go to my newly arranged files and swiftly provide the answer!