Time on our hands
It’s a strange — even eerie — feeling to be waking up without deadlines.
No handouts that urgently need to be finished and sent.
No PowerPoints to fine tune.
No airports to head towards for this week’s trip to or from a genealogy conference.
All of the events where The Legal Genealogist was to speak have been cancelled into early May, and it’s almost certain that there will be more cancellations ahead.
Which means…
All of a sudden there’s time on my hands.
It’d be easy to sit back and focus on the very very large dollop of bad news we’re all been hit with over the past week.
Easy to keep checking the news sites over and over as if that will make things change.
But I’m going to challenge myself to do something different with the time on my hands.
I’m going to try to see it as opportunity knocking.
It’s time to finally learn all the cool new tools available in DNA Painter: to learn to really use the Cluster Auto Painter1 and to play with the tool to paint traits.2 Maybe I’ll even take the time to play with the ancestral trees there.3
It’s time to finally bring the power of Genetic Affairs to bear on my DNA results: to run the Auto Cluster tool there against the various tests I manage and to learn and play with the Auto Tree tool.
It’s time to sit down with Diahan Southard’s new book Your DNA Guide – the Book4 and see what it can teach me about exploring my DNA matches.
It’s time to go back over the second edition of Blaine Bettinger’s Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy5 and see what I missed the first time around.
It’s time to work my way carefully through every module of Angie Bush’s 14-part course in Understanding and Using DNA Test Results, offered by the National Genealogical Society.
It’s time to stop giving presentations and start absorbing them. There are, as of this morning, 134 webinars in the DNA category at Legacy Family Tree Webinars, ranging from Blaine Bettinger’s Foundations in DNA series to the two most recent presentations, by Roberta Estes (3 Genealogy DNA Case Studies and How I Solved Them) and by Blaine (LucidChart and Other Tools for Genetic Genealogy).
Which reminds me… I’ve been looking for time to learn LucidChart too…
It’s even time to stop sighing every time I see that high-level match to a number of family members and finally sit down and work through the trees to see if I can’t actually figure out just how we’re all related to that person.
Yes, it’d be easy to focus on the bad news.
Let’s all do our best to see the opportunity this time gives us instead.
Stay home.
Flatten the curve.6
Let opportunity knock…
And use the time on our hands to grasp some control over our DNA results.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Opportunity knocking,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 15 Mar 2020).
SOURCES
- See Jonny Perl, “Cluster Auto Painter: unravel your DNA test results,” DNAPainter Blog, posted 30 Dec 2019 (https://dnapainter.com/blog/ : accessed 15 Mar 2020). ↩
- See ibid., “Use your chromosome map to explore traits in your DNA,” posted 26 Feb 2020. ↩
- See ibid., “Eight ways you can use ancestral trees at DNA Painter,” posted 11 Mar 2020. ↩
- Diahan Southard, Your DNA Guide – the Book (Coral Springs, Fla. : 2020). ↩
- Blaine T. Bettinger, Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy, 2d edition (Cincinnati: Family Tree Books, 2019). ↩
- See Judy G. Russell, “Because of what today is,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 13 Mar 2020 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 15 Mar 2020). ↩
Love it, ever consider running for office? ha ha! Check out Snapple too, great for mind mapping “what to do with extra time”. I’d love to see a genealogy community wide transcription challenge too!
Running FOR office, lordy lordy no. No no no no. Running FROM office, more like it. 🙂
I spent the entire day yesterday going thru my DNA matches on Ancestry as well as the new messages format. Need to reconnect with a few “cousins” from a few years ago to update where we are in our family history sleuthing!
Judy, you said it all! Those were my exact thoughts and I might add write those stories about yourself and ancestors. There is so much we can do at home! My thoughts and prayers go out to the families who have lost loved ones and to those that are ill. Stay well Judy and everyone else.
We genealogists are an older demographic and at elevated risk from #COVID19. Some of us will need help in the coming weeks. Let’s be #GenealogistsHelping: If you need help, ask; if you are safe then maybe try to help those less fortunate. Within our community we have a powerful reservoir of talent.
Some genealogical societies will need to have online meetings for the first time. Can anybody who has done this before offer to help our neophytes?
Some genealogists might not have planned for what to do with their research when they die. Can our community give advise what researchers, pro and amateur, could do from home now?
Some genealogists haven’t yet DNA tested their oldest generation. Can DNA kit companies drop prices and expedite shipping?
And working on the to-be-solved-in-2019 question of who was Margaret’s mother.
All good ideas in the prior posts. I especially like the idea of a genealogy community wide transcription challenge too.
The Margaret’s mother question got derailed by the #$%@#$# law enforcement use of genealogy databases, darn it. I have candidates. I can’t convince them to test.
You’ve been reading my mind, Judy!
Your ToDo list is almost enough to make me sorry I can work from home!
I heard that knock, and it was loud.
On my virtual writing group platform, (we use slack) I suggested adding mom’s teleworking group. (so far we are only women). As a result, lots of great ideas are shared, as well as a soundboard. I occasionally drop in with obnoxious grandmother suggestions and cheers. Our group other than myself (history doctoral student) is composed of scientists who write (huge data people) as well as historians. Our lists on the daily check-in board look like Judy’s list. We then remind each other to chunk away and cheer when certain tasks are crossed off. Platforms like slack keep us connected as writers, and I have not felt the isolation of writing for years.
There are so many wonderful apps, and ways to stay connected in these days and nights removed from powerful hugable moments, Slack is but one way. I would welcome any invites to genealogists who want to collaborate in this way. My focus is 19th century African American and early Jewish genealogy and histories.