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I have a very modest tree which has been static for a number of years.
Meanwhile, a huge backlog of helpful offers of contacts, trees opened etc has developed because as I rose in my business, I had less and less time to devote to this work.
I am now retired and would like to resume activity in this area to get all the information waiting in messages onto my tree and polite thanks offered to so many who have waited for so long.
However, I have left it so late (I may start waving hallo to my ninety-ith soon, which is discernible on the horizon,) and I need to relearn my way around the program and have quite a bit of help recovering the backlog.
Can anybody recommend a starting point which will give me a trusted assistant to sit beside me and provide reasonably expert guidance- either voluntarily or professionally. I would expect to pay a reasonable sum for such help.
Where do I start. How do I proceed? There is no way I can make useful inroads into this backlog by myself.
(I am an elderly married man, living with my wife, in West Sussex, broadly around the Greenwich Meridian).
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Start small richard. I assume you have a tree on here as you have other trees opened for you. Start with one name, go through the messages and pull out the info for that name, then update your tree.
However, if it's been some time since you worked on your tree, another way is to get rid of all that stuff and start again! Whizz through your messages and send a quick thank you. No explanation is necessary, sometimes it takes a long time to sort out info.
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One thing that might help a little with your messages, if you're talking about at this site, is that you can easily see all the messages exchanged with one person.
Go first to your contacts list. Click on a name. You will get a list of all messages sent to and received from that person.
You might want to print out the list for each person in your contacts list, just so you have something you can look at, to get a better handle on what you have.
If you do "print preview" first in your browser, you can see that you will probably need to print out only "page 2", or maybe 2 and 3, to get the full list for a person.
Then you can tackle the backlog person by person, rather than message by message, and reply one to each person you owe a reply to (and maybe check them off on the list you have printed out), just as a first step.
I understand the bigger problem, though. It's like having all your receipts for income tax in a shoebox. Only worse. ;)
If you are serious about wanting to pay someone to help sort you out, you don't likely need a "genealogist". A student of some sort might be something to consider. They could set up a sort of filing system, with files for branches of the family tree, with a section in each for each person who has been in contact with you and what names and other information they have given you.
If you have access to other members' trees, you will want to get the relevant information from those trees too.
You could try posting a request at a local college or university.
Or you might approach a local family history society, or put a notice in their newsletter, for instance. Again, you're not really needing an expert genealogist at this point, just someone with organizational skills who has a basic grasp of the subject. It could be another retired person just as easily as a student.
I feel for you. I keep being afraid that in 20 years I'm going to be in exactly the same place!
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Thanks Granny Franny and Janey Canuck for your responses. Grany Franny you must be a young granny or are holding up well if like me you are 88 or in that region.
I started my tree long ago- longer than my profile would indicate- it says I started in 2003 I think but there must have been an interruption in my membership because I actually started way back in the early seventies, and I started big so small start was out long ago.
Since then I progressed to Managing Director of a large global company and was too busy at home, office or on branches overseas to attend to my computer.
Now I am retired I have continued the habit of 'business' but only recently came to terms with the fact that life expectancy drops very rapidly now as the years go by, and unfortunately giving anything 'a whizz' becomes nearly impossible. I find it difficult to engage and keep younger folk to do any sort of nice work, e.g. cutting the grass, so I still do it myself. There are limits though!
Janey Canuck- don't start worrying yet- take my advice and work steadily to simplify your life if you are a busy person, as I was. There are things which acquire greater importance, perhaps more emotionally rather than rationally, and leaving a tidy situation behind you is not at all morbid- just normal consideration.
One of the things I want to do is to give my family some idea of where they came from and who there is around who is perhaps a small distance away in terms of relationship, but whom you might wish to find out more about and maybe meet.
Perhaps it is an instinct to flesh out one's own existence, but it has become a little bit of an obsession I suppose, and the information is tantalisingly right there in my mass of unanswered offers of matches and I have no hope of completing unless I find someone younger and quicker on the uptake to plough through it..
Don't forget- do these things whilst you have the ability, you never get to have the time, because time flows so fast when you are old.
Don't be downhearted about this- one can still have a lot of fun.
I will check with university of sussex but have not located any local genealogical societies. Agree I do not need a genealogist- just a bright person, good with the computer program.
Dick C
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Hello Richard,do you have any computer savvy Granchildren?
If you have,you may find that they are more interested than you think,and with the long summer holidays approaching,they may relish a one to one search with you.
If not,and you really mean that you could pay,I would have thought that a hard up student would be glad to spend their summer break helping out,for little more than spending money and lots of home cooked food.
wishing you well in your retirement,Nina in Sheffield.
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