Reflecting back on 2008, it appears that I was only moderately successful at carrying out my New Year's resolution. I made only one resolution last year and that was to get something published. What I had in mind was a family history or a family cookbook. What I actually published were 2 photos books, (one for my daughter about her kitty, and one for my husband about our dog Caesar who died this past August) and a family calendar. I couldn't write about the book for my husband on my blog because he does occasionally read my blog. But that book was about twice the size of the book I created for my daughter. One I created using MyPubisher.com and the other using Shutterfly.com. Both books came out beautifully. Both my husband and my daughter were thrilled to find the books under the Christmas tree. The time and effort I put into them was definitely worth the joy they brought. I think the calendar was much appreciated by its recipients too.
While I am happy with what I did get published, I can't help but wish I'd been able to accomplish more. I suppose that's human nature. Still, there is something I can do to become more efficient with my time and that is to get better organized. I'm talking specifically about reorganizing the genealogy files on my hard drive. Believe it or not, I haven't attempted to reorganize my files since I began my genealogy research over 10 years ago. I have files all over the place. Many are in places that made sense once upon a time but don't make any sense at all now. Whether I'm writing a family history, creating a family cookbook, or even creating heritage scrapbook pages, it would all go much better and quicker if my files were more organized. Therefore, my first resolution for 2009 is to reorganize the genealogy folder on my hard drive.
Another thing I've wanted to do for some time now is to figure a way to get more people involved in the Carnival of Genealogy and take some of the load off myself. To that end, I'm making the following resolutions: 1) Use footnoteMaven's spendid graphic posters on all future editions of the COG. 2) Offer the first of the month editions of the COG (Feb-Dec, 2009) up for guest hosting. I will still publish the middle of the month editions myself. 3) I will publish the future topics of the COG (when they are known) so that those who would like more time to research a specific topic or get ahead on their writing can do so. However, submissions will only be accepted for a given edition when they have been "called for". It would be far too time consuming for me (or for guest hosts) to try to keep track of which posts were submitted for which edition if I accepted them earlier.
And finally, I resolve to create one heritage scrapbook page a month so that I can create a calendar using them for next year. I'm going to focus on the Lipa family for my 2010 calendar.
Those are my genealogy/blogging resolutions for 2009. If I make any progress at all on them I'll be better off for it!
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If you are interested in hosting one of the future editions of the COG, please email me at: imjasia at yahoo dot com. You must have your topic decided at the time you request a date so that I can include it in my compiled list of topics for the year (which I will post as soon as I have it together). Also, you must have participated previously in the COG to be a guest host. Below is a list of available dates. I will remove dates from this list as they are assigned to a guest host.
July 1
October 1
November 1
December 1
