New Year 2018, Looking Back and Looking Forward

Every now and then it's a good idea to take a step back and look at where you're at relative to where you've been and where you want to be. The beginning of a new year is a popular time to do that. With that in mind, here's my take on where I'm at regarding my genealogy...

My goal last year was to write up a family history and I chose my Mizera family line to start with. My intentions were good. I thought I had a good plan although I didn't get far before the plan fell apart. I tried to construct a new plan but that didn't work either. Then I got distracted with other things and never got back to trying to write up the family history.

I did add some names to my family history database last year, some from the Mizera line and some from the Lisowski line. I found some new (to me) sources for information about the lives and times of my families in Poland. And I hired some Polish researchers to help me with finding records and translating them. So that's all good. I helped some friends research their families too. I feel good about that. So I did have some accomplishments last year to further my genealogical journey.

So that's where I'm at looking back on my genealogy-related activities in the past year. Very recently, I came to the realization that I'm not really interested/motivated in writing up my family history. That was a bit of an eye opener for me. I enjoyed writing in the past. I have written two NANOWRIMO novellas, and I've written blog posts about my genealogy, digital scrapbooking, and photography for several years. I remember the writing process to be quite enjoyable to me. But somewhere along the way I lost interest in writing. I used to think of creative writing as one of my hobbies. I don't anymore. It may well be that I just have too many "balls in the air" so to speak. When I make choices of what to do with my hobby time, I never choose genealogy-related writing anymore. Notice I said "genealogy-related" writing. I still write every day but it's rarely about genealogy.

The most recent hobby I've picked up was bullet journaling. I've been doing that for about 15 months now. It's not creative writing the way I do it, it's more like a combination to-do list, planner, tracker, and diary. And the diary entries are most often about the activities of the day. I do spend a good bit of time decorating the pages of my journal (yep, this is old school journaling with pen and paper, not digital) and in that way it's been a good creative outlet for me. But, it takes up a good bit of my hobby time. And it's not genealogy related.

And then there's my painting. The amount of time I put into painting hasn't been as much as I would have liked either. Whenever you try to learn something new you need to apply yourself... practice, practice, practice. I need more practice time painting if I'm going to improve. But the more hobby time I spend painting, the less time I have for genealogy research or writing. It's always a trade off.

The one hobby that I have spent what I consider a fair amount of time on this past year is my photography. I've worked at it and I've improved as a result. I'm happy about that! My photography isn't in any way genealogy-related. It does get me up and moving; most often outdoors, in nature. And that's good for my creativity, my mood, my spirit, and my mind. So it's all good.

So that pretty much sums up a review of all my hobbies over the past year. Going forward, I need to find a way to manage my time better, I guess. I want to do it all but then there's the grocery shopping, house cleaning, bill paying, tax return preparation, vacation planning, house projects (for 2 houses) to manage, etc. And that stuff has a way of interfering with my hobby time all too often, LOL!

Looking forward to 2018, I don't have any specific goals for my genealogy hobby time. I want to continue my research... that's the most fun part of genealogy for me. It's like solving puzzles and I love puzzles. Organizing what I've already found is boring. Writing up the family history doesn't sound like fun anymore. Just an obligation. Quite frankly, I'd rather be painting, or photographing extreme weather, wildlife, beautiful landscapes, butterflies and flowers. But I'm not giving up on my genealogy hobby altogether. I can't see myself ever doing that.

I'm entertaining a dream of one day merging all of my hobbies together... that would require a trip to Poland, so I'll have to overcome my resistance to flying. But I'd love to photograph and journal about the beautiful churches where my ancestors were baptized, married, and buried and the prayer/adoration chapels along the roads to the villages where my ancestors toiled in the soil to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. I'd love to see the parks, the country fields of wheat, the train stations, the castles, the museums, the amber beaches, the snow-covered mountain ranges, the folk art and the folk. My folk. My people. And then come home and paint it all! And then I'd like to put together a photo book of the trip as a companion piece to the family history that I will no doubt be motivated to write after experiencing all that inspiring stuff, LOL! That's my dream. Some day, but not likely in 2018.

Progress is Slow

Good news! I did find those Slownik Geograficzny entries I was looking for! Yeah!

I've also been able to find some family information on a website I visited. By Googling "Wojnicz", one town my Mizera family is from, I found a link to Nekropole.info. I'd heard of the site before but hadn't made the effort to check it out. It turns out that it has the burials listed for the Wojnicz Municipal Cemetery. I was able to find the death date for one of my grandmother's brother's. Yeah! And I may have found the death year for her other brother too but I need to have that confirmed by another source to be sure. No luck finding the death date for grandma's sister yet. And it looks like if her parents were buried there, they aren't anymore.

More good news. I received some information from the Wojnicz parish priest via the genealogist I'd contacted in Poland. I was sent copies of the birth/baptism register entries for one of my grandmother's brothers and her sister. I already had these images from LDS films, BUT, these same entries from the priest had notations of their marriages including the names of their spouses. Yeah! Sort of. Because they aren't marriage records, they don't have all the regular details you would expect to find on a marriage record from the 1920s and 1930s... like the names of the parents of the bride and groom, their ages, addresses, witnesses, etc. So I have some information but not enough info for me to be able to trace the spouse's ancestral lines. :-( Oh well, I am still hopeful that the genealogist I hired will be able to find the actual marriage records for me. Until then, I'm grateful for the progress made. :-)

And one stellar bit of good luck to add! In going through my brother's old slides (taken during the years he was in Vietnam), we came across a family photo taken when he was home on leave. It's a picture of my whole family, both of my parents, my two brothers, and me. What's the big deal, you wonder? It's the only one I've ever seen of all of us in the same room at the same time. I know. Sad, right? Well, mom was almost exclusively the picture-taker and she didn't have a camera with a timer. So she was never in the family pictures, not that there were all that many pictures taken of family events. I screamed and jumped for joy when I saw the slide photo. I didn't think to take a picture of the projected image at the time but my brother was kind enough to do the slide show again and that time I had my camera with me. It will take a LOT of work in Photoshop to make a decent photo from that projected imaged but it's all I have to work with and I'm so very happy to have it. One day my brother may get around to having his slides scanned but that's not in his plans in the near future.

And the last good bit of info I acquired this past month was my Aunt Helen's marriage record from a trial subscription to FindMyPast.com. My mom told me that her sister eloped to Ohio when she got married (1940) but until now I wasn't able to find a record of her marriage. I have it now! Yeah!

The bad news is, this is about all I can say about my genealogy endeavors for the past month. I wasn't able to put in time getting more comfortable with Scrivener. I fear that I will have forgotten what I learned by the time I get it fired up again. And I haven't made any progress in searching my hard drives.

I got sidetracked with Bullet Journaling (BuJo) and that took up the time I might have spent in Scrivener. Let me say a few words about BuJo. I'm excited about the idea of it but the real world practice of it has left me a bit underwhelmed. I created a personal BuJo, tracking my meals, sleep, steps, mood, general health and including task lists and a calendar for future endeavors. It all looks good on paper but I find myself repeatedly recording the same things over and over again (I already track much of this digitally in phone apps). To me, redundancy means wasted time. If I eliminate the stuff I'm already tracking digitally all I'm left with is a standard journal of daily thoughts and activities. Not that that's a bad thing, but I don't find it necessary. And my days are full enough of necessities (my To-Do List) that I already struggle to find time for my painting, photography, and genealogy. Much as I'd like to add daily journaling, it just isn't in the cards right now. I may try to keep it going through October (in a modified version) because I have some exciting personal stuff coming up then but I'm thinking after that I'll let it go in favor of a genealogy BuJo to help me stay on top of my genealogy-oriented organization/research/family-history-writing prep.

I will be spending much of October doing non-genealogy related things so I've not made up specific goals for the month. I'll just have to fit time in here and there as I can. But, I did send in my DNA test kit, and gave my brother his test kit. So I may see some kind of results from those in October. Hope so!

Till next time!