Saturday, August 16, 2014

SNGF: My Genea-Bucket List

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver is to create and share my genealogy bucket list. Specifically, he asks...

What is on your Genealogy Bucket List? What research locations do you want to visit? Are there genea-people you want to meet and share with? What do you want to accomplish with your genealogy research? List a minimum of three items--more if you want! Tell us about it in a blog post.....

This isn't something I've actually thought much about. I've got lots of research questions, but they don't seem to be what Randy's looking for. I'll list a few places I'd like to go and people I'd like to meet, in no particular order.

1. I'd like to do a leisurely research trip from Missouri to Virginia, backtracking my maternal ancestors' migration pattern and spending time in the places where they lived. All of her lines appear to have followed fairly similar routes, so I should be able to answer a few of my research questions.

2. I'd like to spend some time researching in Texas....and possibly meeting some of my paternal relatives. I've never met any of my father's kin or had any luck getting them to respond to my letters and calls. But as far as I can tell, there are still a bunch of them in Texas.

3. I'd like to travel to several areas in Sweden and to the Åland Islands, where my husband ancestors came from. He has a cousin who still owns the old family home on Föglö, which I'd love to see.

4. At some point, I really need to publish all of the research I've been doing for 40+ years. It would be fantastic if I could come up with a meaningful way to share all this information with my kids and cousins--a way that might actually interest them. I've done several short individual stories to send to my maternal side cousins every other year, but can't seem to get my head around pulling everything together. It might help if my papers and files were more organized, but that doesn't seem like a valid bucket list item.

5. Unlike Randy, I don't have any great desire to attend any more large genealogy conferences. I've found to ones I've attended (FGS, NGS, RootsTech) quite disappointing and don't think they're worth the time or money. I would, however, like to attend one of the genealogy institutes for a week, preferably one taught by either Tom Jones of Elizabeth Shown Mills.

I've shared my genea-dreams. What are your's?




1 comment:

  1. I love your list! And, I really like that you are sharing stories with your cousins each year. One Christmas I gave everyone in our immediate family a small booklet. I was thinking about doing that again. Oh and I went to GRIP in Pittsburgh as my first institute this year & I can't wait to do another one!

    I hope you are able to achieve your dreams!

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