Tips & Tricks to Track Your German Russian Ancestors - Tip # 2 - Choose Your Path

As you become a genealogy gatherer, you need to make a choice. How are you going to track your family history and research? It's a key decision.

There are plenty of software programs such as:

• Legacy
• Roots Magic
• Family Tree Maker
• Roots Web
• Family Historian
• Microsoft Excel
• Ancestry
• Family Search

Whatever your choice, tracking your progress is essential.  If you are like me, you start your research with passion, but then life gets in the way....and later, when you find a stretch of time, you wonder, "Where did I leave off? Where are all of the loose ends on which I wanted to follow up?

The syndrome, from which I suffer, is known as ADGD...that is

"Attention Deficit Genealogy Disorder... 

It's when you start researching one ancestor

which causes you to bounce around to different ancestors 

only to end up doing a lot of work with very little to show for it."      

If you want to suffer from ADGD, recognize it is a choice. But, there is a cure...and it goes beyond your choice of software.  I prefer to track my discoveries on a research log.  A research log is essential to organized success. I like the one shown above from my Legacy software. It's easy to use, you fill in the blanks, cite your sources, dates found, and add your follow up notes all on one form.

As you start to track your discoveries, slowly ou can build your family tree like the one below.

One word of warning, as you research,  you will see lots of family trees online.  Some are extremely well done, others not so. To build as accurate a family tree as possible, "Make sure you're doing the research and not just sticking anyone into your family tree."

Stay tuned for Tip # 3 coming soon. 

©2019 Anna Dalhaimer Bartkowski