Creator: Gregg Evans  Copyright: © 2025 GCE Inc. Gregg Evans in the above comic illustrates a common dilemma, so I want to ask:  What excites you? What fills you with satisfaction?   There is a reason that every genealogy and family history expert advises starting projects with a research question, and demonstrates crafting the query into a research plan to save time and money, and success. Success inspires us work through hard problems.   I want to ask another question though, about how you enjoy learning . Whether researching your family, or learning about how to do better research, we all have different learning styles. Do you learn best all by yourself in a quiet place, or with others such as a research group, class, seminar or college class? Is in-person best for you, or recorded sessions you can view at your leisure? Do you prefer reading, listening, or watching videos? Since covid-19 propelled both online meeting and education, we have an abundance o...

Courtesy PublicDomainImages.net "Car Burning Rubber" Deadlines I used to dread writing reports, from grade school on. Deadlines caused dread, and there was no pleasure (or learning) from scrabbling together all the sources into something readable. When I began doing genealogy research, writing reports of my findings never entered my mind! Not even when I found massive help from various books and articles. I never saw myself then as a contributor to the body of knowledge; only as a consumer.  From Consumer to Contributor https://www.wikitree.com/ Two things changed my viewpoint. The first was finding Wikitree, where I took responsibility for the linked profiles for many of the family members I had found through my years of research. The Wikitree focus on sourcing, collaboration and narrative, not just a bare skein of facts, began to change that "consumer" stance, into becoming a contributor.  Focus and Collaboration The other event that taught me how to contribute be...