First Year Accomplishments
I have been researching my family for only a little over a year, but I am excited to share some of the highlights of my work:
- Interviewed parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and every other known living relative
- Explored the depths of my parents' attic and asked my in-laws for family pictures and stories
- Video-taped my mom and aunt as they told childhood stories
- Visited my great aunt in Bainbridge several times and had wonderful lunches while we shared stories and pictures!
- Met 3 newly discovered "cousins" in person!
- Traveled to Decatur County, GA and Wilkes County, NC fro on-site research
- Spent major bucks on an Ancestry.com subscription
- Tried out 3 genealogy programs and finally settled on Legacy 5.0 Deluxe
- Entered data, stories, and sources for almost 3,000 relatives
- Obtained two county heritage books and one general genealogy book
- Wrote numerous letters and made calls to county clerks and librarians
- Obtained birth and death records on every relative for which one was available
- Spent many late nights browsing through the census images page-by-page
- Visited the Georgia Archives in Morrow, GA
- Visited several cemeteries and took tombstone photos
- Scrolled through numerous microfilm reels to locate obituaries, marriage announcements, and other news articles
- Posted questions (and sometime answers) to 15-20 message boards
- Began monitoring several rootsweb lists
- Scanned over 300 family pictures and documents into my computer
- Learned the basics of photo editing in order to preserve the pictures carefully
- Started my own little research group to gather and analyze information on the Riches from Decatur and Emanuel Counties in Georgia
- Uncovered 16 Revolutionary War veterans in my family lines
- Applied for membership to the Daughters of American Revolution
- Began working on a family heritage scrapbook
- Learned enough about web hosts, FTP, image compression, and HTML to create this web site!