The Chart Chick's Quick Insider's Guide to Salt Lake City

To help you with your trip to RootsTech and the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, I've been hard at work revising and updating my earlier blog posts about Salt Lake City into a quick and easy guide that will make your trip more enjoyable.

Introducing:

The Chart Chick's Quick Insider's Guide to Salt Lake City.

It is available as a free pdf available at www.familychartmasters.com/slc.

And I've put it on Lulu for anyone who wants a print copy. You can order it right now until RootsTech starts on February 2nd for 30% off the regular $14.95 price making it just over $10.

Thanks to Thomas MacEntee for encouraging me to get this out there. I hope you all enjoy it. Stop by the Family ChartMasters' booth and let me know what you tried out and how you liked it. We'll see you soon.

Getting the next generation involved--a testimonial

This testimonial made our day today. And just look at these pictures! This is why we do what we do.

Dear Janet and Erin,

Hope your new year's off to a good start!

I've been meaning to write and tell you just how thrilled my family was with the custom chart you created for us. It turned out even more beautifully than I had imagined, and I was so excited to give it to them Christmas morning. My mother- and father-in-law were speechless at first, then in tears when they realized what it was. My sisters- and brothers-in-law were also amazed, even though they knew I was making it, and so appreciative when I gave them their own copies. But what really surprised me was how touched my nieces, nephews, and own children were (a total of eight kids in their teens and 20's). The chart really moved them. To say it was a hit would be quite an understatement. Within a day, it was hanging in a place of honor in the front foyer.

I truly believe this is the best thing I could have possibly done to share my work on the family history and get the rest of the family interested in their ancestry. Thank you for all the hours you put into making the chart a reality for me. Family ChartMasters was a delight to work with from start to finish. You seemed to grasp my idea for the chart right away, and whenever I made yet another revision or swapped another picture you cheerfully incorporated it. The chart will be a family treasure for many years to come. I look forward to working with you again on other branches of my family!

Just to give you an idea, my 24-year-old daughter put a picture of her grandmother and grandfather holding the chart on her Facebook page with the caption, "The best Christmas gift ever!"

Thanks again and best wishes,
Shelley
http://www.asenseoffamily.com/

The 6 basic principles of sharing your family history with your children.

I've got a bunch of videos we've been editing from how things went over Christmas. I can't wait to show you Mom and Dad's reaction to the kids' family history present for them and how it went when we took everyone to the library to start verifying these records. So stay tuned for that. 15-year-old boy is editing the videos and I'm trying to get him to repress the perfectionist in his nature or you'd never see them. But as much as I want you to see them, I want him to do it himself more, so you'll have to be patient.

In the meantime I have a section of my new book for you. Likewise coming soon. Here's a sneak peek. The 6 basic principles of sharing your family history with your children.

• If you make it boring it will be boring. Start with an attention getter and make sure you are a good story teller. Anyone would be interested in seeing a picture of their great-grandfather who looked just like them. And any child would like to see his grandfather's school report card when he was their age. All children will listen to stories about the trouble their mother got into as a child. Start with photos, games, or engaging stories if you want your family to be interested in what you have to tell them about their family's past.
• Don't underestimate their abilities and interest level. Working with children, I've been consistently amazed at how much interest they had even when I didn't expect it. When you expect them to be interested, but keep in mind their attention level, you will find that they will surprise you with their excitement about their history. If they aren't all that interested, return to the paragraph above and analyze the way you are presenting it to them.
• You may not inspire a self proclaimed genealogist but you will have a child that knows about their family history. While your children or grandchildren my not identify themselves as a genealogist, they may still grow up knowing alot about their family of origin. Any child can benefit from the blessings of family history whether they become a zealot for the cause or not. Each time they encounter their family's history more and more of the benefits of knowing their past will come into play in their lives.
• Teaching about family history is a lifestyle, not a single event. Every little encounter children have with their family history is a little more they know about their past. Encounters can be as small as a comment or as large as a full scale family event. But over the course of time, big and small encounters with family history add up to a foundational knowledge about where the family came from and a more developed sense of self for the child.
• Family history is best passed down when you know the family members you are trying to involve. Know the attention span of the children you are working with. Know how they approach problems and what frustrates them. Know what interests and hobbies they have that might tie in to a project you want to do. Find a characteristic they have in common with an ancestor. When you bring the family history to the child rather than try to bring the child to family history, your child's connection will be much stronger and easier to forge.
• If you are excited about it, and if you have a good relationship, they will be more inclined to be excited about their family history too. My kids joke that when they work on family history with me they get in my "good zone." They know that I am passionate about it, and they know that I love it when they get involved. They know that after working on family history with me, they can talk me into many privileges that I might have otherwise said no to because I trust that their souls are fed and I can trust them more with other aspects of their lives. Hopefully they will come away from our time together with a love for family history because they love me. I know they have already developed a love for family history because they love their grandparents. And hopefully their experiences with family history will be associated with joy because their mother was so happy with them when they were working on it.

Like my Great Grandfather Joseph Hatten Carpenter said, "One arises from the study of genealogy with a clearer and more charitable conception of the whole brotherhood of man." Who wouldn't want to inspire that in their kids?

2012 Conference Plans--So Far

• January 20th and 21st 2012,Family History Expo, Mesa, Arizona
• January 23rd-27th, 2012, Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, Salt Lake City, UT--Janet will be Administrating as UGA President.
• February 2nd-4th 2012,Rootstech Family History Conference, Salt Lake City, UT--Janet will be speaking.
• February 24th-26th, 2012, Who Do You Think You Are Live Conference, London England--Janet will be speaking.
• March 3rd, 2012, Utah Genealogical Association Semi-Annual Conference, Bountiful, UT--Janet will be speaking.
• May 9th-12th, 2012, National Genealogy Society Conference, Cincinnati, OH
• June 8th-10th, 2012, Southern California Genealogical Society Conference, Burbank, CA--Janet will be speaking.

Triumph!!!

11:30 am Christmas Eve Morning. We've finished. We did it. Woot Woot. There were moments where I didn't think we were going to make it. I've been worried this week that the kids would experience the agony of defeat and a learning experience rather than the joy of a successful project. But yea! It worked, it worked.

453 family group sheets digitized
145 Kim
90 Janet
98 15 year old boy
60 13 year old boy
60 11 year old girl.

How it all went down before it took a swing for the better.

Last night, on Christmas Adam (the night before Eve), we left the kids to themselves while we went to our traditional Iron Chef competition with my sisters (another story). The kids were supposed to stay home and work on their extraction. The last two days that they've been out of school we've been working and working as long as their attention spans would allow. The attention spans haven't been much. When they are sitting at a computer, using the internet, the draw of the surf is harsh. They can't concentrate. They are drawn to this and that--mostly the boys are drawn to the current video game that all their friends are playing. Honestly I know alot of adults who are the same way. It seems like we are becoming a culture of trivia buffs who can't get a major project done. I have days like that too at times.

So we'd been dragging through the last couple of days. I've been frustrated that they've said "yeah, I'm doing it" but then the surf drags them away. It was coming down to the line. We still had way too much to do.

In retrospect it was crazy to think they'd work on it last night. They're teenagers for heaven's sake. I expect alot out of them. But when we got home, I would have been disappointed to find out they hadn't gotten much done, but I was downright mad when I found out they hadn't been doing much that morning when I was sitting in the family room working on it with them. I was really mad.

So we had one of those terrible motherhood moments. I yelled at them last night. I was so frustrated with them that they couldn't do it without me sitting there with them. I had wanted it to get finished up so that we could do other things today (Christmas Eve). Why couldn't we have gotten it done early? I wanted to make Christmas cookies, relax, visit with family more etc. But the morning was spent go, go, go on getting this project done. In the end it was ok. Saved us some calories. But we went to bed last night not thinking we were going to be able to finish it. And I went to bed thinking I had forever ruined my children's chances of ever liking family history. If they have this Mom that is uber-stressed about it, they'll just resent it. I hadn't won the battle, and more importantly I had lost the war.

So last night, when we were going to bed, I asked them--how are you going to get it done? 15 year old boy said he wanted us to get him up at 7am. Now you have to understand that getting this child out of bed in the morning is harder than raising the dead--literally. Nothing gets him up--not love or money. Some school days it's come to a glass of cold water. He's growing and he just needs alot of sleep. But that's when the turning point came.

At 7 am when Kim and I came down to wake him up, he was already sitting on the couch doing extraction.

Yes, yes he was.

I attribute it more to his love of his grandparents at this point than to his love of family history. But I'll take it.

In the end we all worked together. Kim saved us. Kim rocks at Genealogy. He did pages and pages of this extraction, and finished up the two younger kids projects. Kim can always find the things on microfilm that I can. He is just quick at it. In a religious sense it came out as a perfect celebration of the life of Christ. Kim came in and made up for what the younger kids couldn't do themselves. 15 year old helped with some of that too. Or as 15 year old son put it to his younger brother as he was doing some of younger brother's pages "You have saved our lives--we are eternally grateful (In a little green alien voice from the movie Toy Story."

Yes--their Mom has put too much emphasis on this. They think their lives are at stake.

It was really beautiful watching it all come together this morning. I was sitting by 11 year old girl, encouraging every little bit out of her last two pages. She was too stressed. But it all melted away as those last couple of pages were done. It was a real sense of joy. I think they all felt it. Relief. Pride. A job well done.

I'm a little worried about the Christmas memories they will take into their respective families. Instead of sweet Christmas baking memories they'll have these mad family history project memories. Oh well. There already weren't alot of cookie making memories--more packaging and shipping family history chart memories. We'll relax next week like we always do.

I think the major point to learn today, is that it is really good to have deadlines. We've all drug it out, me included, thinking we would have time to do it later. But when it comes down to a deadline, it gets done. Birthdays, Anniversaries, Christmas are great excuses for deadlines. It just works.

We're off to have a beautiful Christmas celebration. And present to my Mom and Dad the family history project extraordinare. They boys have already said that they may be willing to do another book next year. We've already decided though that we are going to start in January and have it done early to avoid the last minute drama. I wonder if that will work or if we will need to rely on the deadline principle again. Whatever happens, I think cleaning up and going over this database we've created is going to need to be the next project. I'm looking forward to doing that one myself.

Stay tuned. We're headed to the library with my parents on Wednesday to verify some of this stuff.

Thank heavens for key strokes

All too many laptops in this house...

So I probably made too big of a deal out of citing all the sources perfectly. I've annoyed myself now.

We're in crunch time with the present for Mom and Dad. Family ChartMaster's Christmas rush is over--you can't mail anything anymore. Since most of our charts are shipped out all over the world, we have a respite the two days before Christmas when you can't ship anything. Over the years as Christmas Rush has become busier and busier that last two days seem more and more peaceful in comparison. But not this year. I've been so busy with the company, we're in a different kind of rush now, a rush to get this indexing project done. But that's a good rush.

Making new genealogists do sources perfectly is not the smartest thing to do. You don't want to get them bogged down in the details or it isn't fun. I know better than to start the kids out with demanding perfect sourcing, but that is so important in this project so that we can build on the research my great-grandfather did. The kids haven't complained. They've been really good about it. But in this last push to finish the project--I'm the one wishing it were easier :)

About three sources for each of the events. *Tedious*. But I know it's going to pay off big when we go back to combine people and further the research. I hope the kids forgive me at that point. I just couldn't do it otherwise. Just think how wonderful it will be to have a big clean database of all this research that then we can go and verify and build on. It would be a mess to go back and have to clean up sources later. We had to start with the sources right from the beginning.

Keystrokes have saved me. That's why you can't really compare genealogy softwares and say one is better than the other. Some take alot of screens and clicks to do something and some take less. I think they're all a different number of clicks for different tasks too. If you are going to use genealogy software alot for one task, it might be useful to go through the different softwares and see how many clicks and keystrokes it takes to do what you are doing. It would be interesting to see a tally of how many clicks and keystrokes there are for the many of the tasks in each of the softwares. But even then, that wouldn't tell you which is the best for you at something else. That's why I always say that the softwares are like a pair of shoes. They each have their good points and their bad points, they each go with different clothes and fit different people. (And it helps to stay neutral when we work with each of the companies so much.)

Once again it is amazing how when I sit and do it with them they concentrate and get to work. Yesterday they had just as much to do, but even though they intended to work on it, they didn't. I'm convinced that's because I was busy finishing up genealogy charts for clients rather than sitting with them. Inspire not Require they say. It's true.

I've done enough extraction today that I've found a person who's birthday is today, and who's birthday is the same as mine. That's *alot* of extraction LOL. It feels good though. Like eating nutritiously. I'm so excited to take this data to the library and see what we can build. I think we're going to make it.

Are we going to make it?

453 pages of family group sheets.  Perhaps we bit off more than we could chew?  I'm not sure how much we've gotten done and how much we have left.  Wouldn't you know it- I'm the one who has the most to do.  What was I thinking taking on something like this in the middle of Christmas rush?
One week left.  I'll let you know.