Best Reason to Throw a Party The best excuse to clean your house , I once read, is to ready it for a party . While cleaning house, I thought, is the same true about "writing it up"? Writing the stories of our ancestors and relatives is the culmination of our work. When we know that our place is welcoming to guests, we feel free to celebrate; telling stories of the past unlocks the lives of our families to all who hear them. Writing the stories is t he best excuse to research. Write while researching so that that your thoughts have somewhere to go‒directly into the notes, before they evaporate. Writing soothes the itch in the brain instead of sending us down rabbit holes. Now is a great time to get started writing, in preparation for Family History Month in October . Courtesy of the National Genealogical Society Writing tests our research and thinking It is while writing that holes in the story are exposed, inconsistencies glare, and leaps of logic fall flat. If our analysis

Generated by Bing Image Creator 2 August 2024 This post is for all of you who do not want to use AI .  If you're hesitant about using AI, you're not alone. Many people are wary of handing their privacy over to a machine. However, AI can be a powerful tool for genealogists, and you may find it more helpful than you first thought. You may have felt the same about spreadsheets and calculators, yet now they are tools in your daily life.  Just as calculators and spreadsheets revolutionized how we handle numbers and budgets, AI chatbots and large language models (LLMs) are transforming our interaction with language and information. So you may eventually use AI to help you do your work in research, document transcription and analysis, writing, research reports, timelines , DNA analysis, emails and other record-keeping. Some can analyze photos and other images or to pull out family connections from a will, and draw a family tree. Of course, you must check the work, as you do your incom