The Best Laid Plans . . .

I've come to realize over the years that I can plan and plan but that, in the end, I often go astray from those plans. Why? Because I'm human. I don't see the whole picture. God does though. This past year I had to change my plans several times. I'm thankful to the people with whom I was working on the FGS Conference for Knoxville who knew when they needed to help a little more when I was dealing with my mother's diagnosis with cancer, surgery, extended illness, and ultimate death. I had to slow down a bit after a foot injury at FGS caused me to have to stay off my feet a bit more for much of the remainder of 2010. My left foot healed by October, but my right one is just now at a point where I can bear to apply fairly normal pressure on it. I have been able to research in some facilities, but others which required more walking were not an option for me. As far as 2010, our church choir had planned to go on a mission trip to northern Vermont. I was looking forward to going there because Vermont is one of the states that I've not had the privilege of visiting. I was also going to be able to cross the border into Quebec and add another Canadian province to my places visited category. Those plans were shattered when a long-time employee of the church was discovered to have embezzled 1.5 million dollars. Much of our operating funds were frozen for a time while the investigation took place so we were going week to week there for awhile. I decided to see if there were any openings at Samford (which had been a conflict with the choir mission trip) and found that there was one opening in the Military Records class so I signed up and went to Samford instead. I made several research trips to Nashville -- some of those included client work, but many were able to include at least some personal research. All of these were not in my original plans for the year, but it's hard to imagine anything else at this point.

Now - what are my plans for this year which will likely alter over the course of the year?

In the next few weeks I'll be updating the handout for my NGS presentation about Mississippi research. This is a fairly recent handout so it probably won't change drastically, but I like to update them from time to time.

I'm planning to carve out a little more time to work on FamilySearch Indexing projects. This is likely to take place by making myself indexing at least one census image which usually requires about 15-20 minutes before beginning another project.

I want better access to the articles in the journals and magazines in my personal collection, so I'm going to continue to gradually add these to LibraryThing as titles owned, tag them, give the remaining bibliographic citation (journal title, volume, issue, publication date, pages) in the publication field, etc.

I'm planning to take on more client work this year so this will slow down my own research even more. However, I am planning to focus my research on about three of my families. The first of these is my Mosely/Mosley/Moseley family which ended up in middle Tennessee. They are quite challenging because they spent most of their time in a burned county (Giles). I've found records in several surrounding counties. One of the interesting things is that there is another Moseley family in the same area which is usually connected to a completely different line. I want better evidence than has been published by other researchers that the families are not connected and that ours comes from a different line. The other two families are some that landed in Southeastern Ohio -- the Dearborns and the Taylors. I am speaking at a library conference that will be held at Cedarville University in Cedarville, near Springfield, Ohio, in June. I'm hoping that I can spend some time before or after the conference researching these families who lived in Washington, Morgan, and Athens Counties in the early to mid 19th century. (My Rathbone line was also in the area so I may get a little more information on that one although I have a bit more documentation on this family than the others. Also Lovica Rathbone Taylor married Capt. William Davis later, so I may need to spend a little time with that surname as well.)

I have a couple of lectures that I'm extremely interested in developing. I've had them on paper for awhile and need to get them "ready to go." I suspect that finding examples that I can use to illustrate my slides and getting permissions to use the images will be the time-consuming part.

I have one goal which I don't wish to share publicly at this time. I will spend time working on this goal off and on throughout the year. It's actually one that is already in progress. With a full-time job and other commitments, it will likely take longer than this year to achieve.

Will all this be achieved? I don't know, but God does.

This post was composed for the 101st edition of the Carnival of Genealogy.