You might recall the little family history pocket notebook I started carrying around last year to keep my notes, to-do lists, and general questions in. I started it as an experiment based on a memory of a pocket notebook my Uncle Kent pulled out when I visited that contained my great grandpa Dutch’s Oatmeal Cookie recipe. I figured that big ideas and important documentation doesn’t always need to be fancy or flashy and if I could easily carry it around, then I might be more apt to use and reference it on my family history wanderings as I made my way through 2024.

Guess what?

It worked.

It’s hard to sit in the liminal space between endings and beginnings without lots of reflection, a little nostalgia, and copious amounts of inspiration, in my world at least ;-) Turning the page from one year into the next typically feels vastly expansive, but this year in particular has me thinking I have all kinds of capacity to accomplish my genealogy goals.

I finally admitted to myself a few months ago that the family history goals I’d set for myself at the end of last year were simply delusional but didn’t have the time or capacity for properly assessing and re-setting those goals in an achievable way.

Thankfully, as the chaos of growing season shifts into a gentler Autumn, I was able to create enough space in my head to brainstorm what went wrong and how I might shift some internal expectations and some physical spaces to better set myself up for success.