2024 was a pretty good genealogy year for me and Genea-Musings - Artificial Intelligence (AI) and FamilySearch Full-Text Search were the highlights for me.
Looking back over the past year, I see that I pursued these genealogy and family history related activities:
(image created by Meta AI)
1) Genealogy Society Work
- Moderated 11 CVGS Research Group monthly meetings (in Zoom meetings) with 15 to 40 in attendance, usually providing an hour of content.
- Moderated 12 CVGS DNA Interest Group monthly meetings (in Zoom meetings) with 15 to 30 in attendance, usually providing an hour of content.
- Attended 10 CVGS monthly General Meetings (in Zoom meetings) with 30 to 70 in attendance.
- Attended in-person 9 CVGS education meetings and helped answer questions for new genealogists.
- Attended the CVGS annual picnic (June) and holiday party (December) in-person and enjoyed seeing my CVGS colleagues.
- Wrote, edited, published, and emailed 12 CVGS monthly Newsletters (10-12 pages each month) to the CVGS membership in the 15th year of my editorship.
- Served on the CVGS Board of Directors for the 22nd consecutive year as Research Group Chair, DNA Group Chair, and Newsletter Editor, and attended monthly Board meetings and General Society program meetings (10 in Zoom).
- Gave three presentations to distant genealogical societies on topics of interest in 2024, but none to my San Diego societies.
2) Education
- Watched about 20 Legacy Family Tree Webinars as part of my subscription to the service.
- Attended RootsTech Connect 2024 virtually over three days, and watched over 100 presentations.
- Attended the SDGS January and September seminars, and every SDGS online program meeting and special webinars on Zoom.
- Attended most of the SDGS DNA Interest Group meetings on Zoom from hosted by Colin Whitney, often with speakers.
- Attended most of the SDGS British Isles Interest Group on Zoom hosted by Colin Whitney.
- Watched hundreds of YouTube videos about genealogy-related topics - I subscribe to about 130 YouTube channels for genealogy.
- Read the NEHGS magazines and downloaded them to my genealogy education folders. American Ancestors also provides digital editions of a number of periodicals for New England which I search occasionally and download articles about my ancestral families to my genealogy digital folders.
- Downloaded syllabus articles from RootsTech, Legacy Family Tree Webinars, CVGS programs, and SDGS programs, and saved them to my education digital folders.
- Read thousands of genealogy-related blog posts from hundreds of geneabloggers using Feedly on a daily basis.
3) Blogging
- Investigated and wrote about new genealogy research, family tree, DNA and artificial intelligence tools as they appeared over the year.
- Wrote "Ask AI" articles about topics of interest using the free Artificial Intelligence chatbots (ChatGPT4, Claude, CoPilot, Gemini, Grok, Meta, and Perplexity). Had lots of "genealogy fun" creating AI images to suport blog posts.
- Created NotebookLM AI biographies and podcasts about selected ancestors and myself. Transferred podcast audio to text using AI tools.
- Added an Artificial Intelligence Compendium as a Genea-Musings page to capture significant content and my own work about genealogy and AI.
- Wrote over 950 blog posts on Genea-Musings in the 19th year of the blog. Most of my posts are about my own research (e.g., Amanuensis Monday, Genealogy Pot-Pourri, Seavers in the News, Wordless Wednesday, Treasure Chest Thursday, Famous Cousins, 52 Ancestors/Relatives, and Saturday Night Genealogy Fun), but some are genea-curation about the industry (e.g., New and Updated Ancestry Collections; New and Updated FamilySearch Collections; New and Updated MyHeritage Collections; Findmypast Friday; Genealogy News Bytes, Genealogy Education Bytes; and Best of the Genea-Blogs), occasional guest posts, press releases, artificial intelligence questions and trials, genealogy software, online collections, or industry issues. See:
- I now have about 17,787 posts and 21.6 million page views on the Genea-Musings blog since 2006 according to Google.
4) DNA Tests and Analysis
- I have autosomal DNA test results at AncestryDNA (test), MyHeritageDNA (upload), FamilyTreeDNA (test), 23andMe (test), Living DNA (upload), and GEDmatch (upload).
- Reviewed my DNA matches on a regular basis, and made notes about the match data, including known relationships and common ancestors. I have spreadsheets for the highest matches on AncestryDNA, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, and MyHeritageDNA matches with collected information. I occasionally downloaded my Shared DNA segments from MyHeritageDNA, FamilyTreeDNA and 23andMe.
- Created updated AutoCluster groups for MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA and 23andMe using the Genetic Affairs program.
- Did not add much to my DNA Painter chromosome mapping based on known common ancestors on MyHeritageDNA, FamilyTreeDNA, and 23andMe.
5) Genealogy Research and Family Trees
- Had several breakthrough moments doing research using FamilySearch Full-Text Search, including:
- A 3rd great-grandmother, Mary (Partridge) Feather (1792-1853) that added her whole line to my family tree
- Land records for second great-grandfather James A. Kemp and 3rd great-grandfather Alexander Sovereen in Norfolk County. Ontario.
- Found several more caches of family photos and artifacts hiding in file cabinets, file boxes, and piles.
- Re-organized my family photos for major families - mine and Linda's, our daughter's families, my parents, Seavers, Carringers, Lelands.
- Used the MyHeritage Reimagine mobile app (until June) to image photo album pages and loose photos to add hundreds of photos to my collection.
- Colorized and enhanced over 100 more family photos using the MyHeritage photograph tools.
- Used the MyHeritage DeepStory and LiveMemory photo tools to add animation to selected photographs.
7) Family Stories
- Experimented with Artificial Intelligence programs to write ancestor biographies using ChatGPT and other chatbots, plus creating poems and songs (using Suno) to commemorate their lives.
- Published my StoryWorth book with 37 stories about my life, many with photographs. I gave the book to my daughters for Christmas 2024.
- Started creating presentations with photos and captions about my life, Linda's life, my parents lives, and my grandparents lives for posterity. Hopefully, these will be YouTube presentations.
- Continued writing biographies about my close relatives (aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) for the 52 Relatives series.
- Added digital images of genealogy records, downloaded books, or articles, to my ancestral education, surname and family digital files on a regular "as found" basis.
- Added other genealogy-related documents (e.g., society newsletters, presentation handouts, artificial intelligence images, AI text content, etc.) to my Genealogy digital file folders.
- Backed up the digital files to Google Drive occasionally and iDrive in the cloud daily, and some files to Dropbox for transfer to the laptop on an as-needed basis.
9) Summary
- I "advanced the genealogy ball" by making some genealogy and family tree discoveries, trying new methods and resurces, and had a lot of genea-fun.
- I do the above activities almost every day for 5 to 8 hours a day, seemingly chained to my computer. A lot of my reading of email, blogs and social media are done on my phone now. I worked about 2,000 hours on genealogy-related activities in 2024. I didn't make any money doing this but spent some. I think I'm my own boss.
10) Real Life
- I love having time for family activities (occasional visits from or with the daughters and grandkids - some calls on Facetime). I visit Linda in her skilled nursing and memory care facility almost every day for an hour.
- The year saw improved health for me (knocking on wood!) - my pacemaker stabilized my heart rate, I've slept better, but have lapsed into eating sweets again. I had two skin cancers on my head removed in 2024. I'm trying to walk a bit every day, and work in the yard weekly.
- I watched Padres baseball on TV, Chargers and NFL football on TV, and SDSU Aztecs football/basketball on TV.
- I read the local newspaper, genealogy books and magazines, and fiction books (mostly mystery books from the public library) while watching TV.
- I check Facebook and Twitter daily, and read or watch local news and political news/events online, on my phone, and on TV.
- Then there's the household chores (bills, mail, shopping, cooking, dishes, laundry and cleaning), but I'm pretty lax.
- Pretty boring, eh?
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1 comment:
Wishing you a 2025 with more fun genealogy adventures "being your own boss."
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