How Setting Genealogy Goals Makes You A Better Researcher
*This post may have affiliate links, which means I may receive commissions if you choose to purchase through links I provide (at no extra cost to you). All opinions remain my own.
Updated September 14, 2022
We all know that genealogy research is a marathon, not a race. Your family tree is never truly done.
That’s part of the appeal of it, right? There’s always something more to look for.
So how do you tackle what can feel like both a world of possibilities and total overwhelm about what to do next?
You set genealogy research goals to take you step-by-step through building your family tree.
In this article, I’ll share how to set genealogy goals that are realistic and achievable to help you succeed in adding to your family history.
Related posts:
Why You Need a Genealogy Research Log
7 Tips To Help You Create A Successful Genealogy Research Plan
12 Tips For Getting Back Focus And Motivation In Your Genealogy Research
Why it’s important to set genealogy research goals
I know that planning genealogy goals can be harder than other personal or professional objectives. I mean, how can you pick just a few when there are so many people in your family tree to learn more about?
How do you plan when you don’t know if you’re going to come across something that will lead you down a new path and change what you want to look for?
We’ve all been there. You’re researching and something catches your eye and sparks your curiosity.
You decide to take a “quick look” into this new thing and suddenly hours later, you’re still looking at it (or even another shiny object or two) and you’re no closer to finding what you started out looking for.
That’s exactly why you need genealogy goals.
Choosing only a few research targets keeps you on track so you don’t go chasing bright shiny objects all over the internet.
In genealogy research, there are way too many of these and they can derail you fast.
Getting specific doesn’t have to be limiting, either. It can get you more excited and motivated to research because you know where to direct your energy.
My recent successes thanks to genealogy goal setting
Genealogy is the only hobby that gets harder the longer you do it, right?
I’m not above picking a name out of my family tree and randomly searching for them. Sometimes it can be fun, and you never know what you may find. Serendipity is part of the thrill of the chase.
But I’ve been doing this a long time and I’m at the stage where almost all research is hard. No more plugging in a name into a search box and going back four generations in an hour.
Because of this, I’ve had to get much better about setting priorities, so I do fewer random searches and more dedicated searches. This has helped me to achieve what I feel is a lot, even though the research is trickier now.
Some of my successes from the past couple of years are:
1) Identified the church parish and/or townland of my five Irish branches. I didn't even know the counties they came from, except for one of them, when I started out. Through a lot of collateral research, I found the hometowns of four of them and even found parish records in Ireland for them!
2) Tracked down information on my great-grandfather’s first wife. He was briefly married to a woman who left him. She was a picture bride and they had two kids together before she ran off with another man and had a bunch of kids with him. I knew her name, but nothing else.
Once I focused on her, I found her marriage, information on all of her kids, a court record, and her alien registration file. Now I know where she was from and her parents.
3) Found the parents of my 4th great-grandmother, Sarah Merrill. Although I’m still gathering more evidence, I feel very confident I have the right parents and have started to work on who her grandparents were as well. A clue in a Civil War pension file for her son helped lead me to them.
4) Found a very likely couple for the parents of my 3rd great grandfather, Joseph Sylvester. He’s a mystery. All I know is that he was from Quebec, and he left very few records in the US before abandoning his family and disappearing. Through a lot of searching and focus, I found the people I believe could be his parents.
5) Concentrated on my genealogy education and added a lot of new skills and ideas for resources to my genealogy toolkit. Investing the time has paid off with tons of inspiration and knowledge that have helped me reach these goals. My favorite genealogy education resources are societies and Legacy Family Tree webinars because they’re always adding fresh webinar content and there’s a lot of variety of topics you can learn about.
How to set genealogy goals
Before you set goals, I believe it’s important to first reflect on your wins and how you achieved them. This will enable you to replicate your success. Most importantly, you need to celebrate your successes!
1) List out all your genealogy successes from the year (or whatever time period you choose), no matter how small. It’s so easy to get caught up in searching for something, uncovering it, then moving on to looking for the next thing. We need to celebrate what we discover more often.
There’s always something to be proud of and lessons to be learned.
2) Write down what skills and resources you learned over the year. What new things helped you become a better genealogist? Acknowledging what skills and resources helped you will keep them fresh in your mind the next time you have a challenging research problem. They’ll also help you see what else you may need to learn to keep working on brick walls.
3) Pick 2-5 objectives that would be most impactful to your genealogy research.
Some questions to help guide this are:
Who do you most want to learn about?
What record could you dig up that would make the most difference in your research?
What brick walls do you have?
What skills do you want to develop?
Besides finding out specific things about an ancestor, I suggest also creating one for your education and/or one “back-end” such as organizing all of your papers into binders. Organization and skill development will support you in the actual research.
4) Set SMART goals. You’ve probably heard this term before. You want them to be:
Specific. Be precise, like locating your 5x great grandparents’ marriage.
Measurable. What steps can you take to make it? Will you research for 15 minutes a day? Will you attend a conference or institute to learn the skills you want to build?
Aligned (some say Achievable, but I like Aligned). What are your bigger picture family tree wishes? If you want to apply for dual citizenship to a country or learn where your family immigrated from, does it align with that?
Realistic. They can be stretch goals, like to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, but be careful not to get too ambitious. Don’t set a goal to trace your family from the 1900s back to the 1400s in one year. You want them to be achievable and to feel successful so you can keep up your momentum.
Timebound. When would you like to have accomplished this? Set a deadline for it. Or maybe it’s ongoing, like to take genealogy webinars. How many will you watch and in what timeframe?
Take the time to break down each goal into manageable, measurable, timebound steps.
5) Finally, think through what you need to meet your goals. What skills do you need and how can you develop them? What resources do you need and where can you get them?
Review your goals often and adjust as needed. It’s okay to revise your plans based on something you find, your life circumstances, or if you just feel like it.
I like to keep mine in Evernote and written out by my desk. It reminds me what my main priorities are when I sit down to do research.
Final thoughts
By setting objectives, thinking through what skills you need to learn and what resources you need to get there, you’ll make big steps toward finding answers.
You’ll stop randomly typing in names into search boxes and actually have small, detailed, easy to follow steps to guide you.
Being exact about what you want to find doesn’t mean you can’t research other things when you feel like it. It simply keeps you focused so you don’t go off on too many tangents, which is very easy to do in family history research.
What research goals do you have right now?