5 August Genealogy Activities: Family History 101

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A calendar showing the month of August is surrounded by school supplies, including pens, pencils, scissors, and a padlock. The words "Back to School!" are written on a date in the calendar.

You might not know where—or when—your next “semester” of genealogy will take you. But these five projects will get you ready.

1. Go Shopping for ‘School’ Supplies

Students around the country go back to school this month, and stores are stockpiling notebooks, colored pencils and graphing calculators. You’re probably past school age (we won’t ask by how much!), but you can still take advantage of deals on office supplies at local stores.

Take stock of your research materials, such as:

File folders
Binders
Pens
Notecards and sticky notes
Acid-free, archival-safe materials (folders, tissue paper, etc.) for preserving photos and heirlooms
Hard drives and other storage devices

Look for deals and special discounts. For example, many states have “tax holidays,” days or weekends during which state sales taxes are suspended so parents (and savvy genealogists) can save money on school supplies.

2. Check Your Digital Files

If you’ve been following our monthly guidance, you spent April weather-proofing your research and May digitizing photos.

Whatever the status of your digitization efforts, review your digital files to make sure you’re staying organized. Organization isn’t a one-time event; your genealogy collection requires constant maintenance.

Have you stayed consistent with your file names, making sure they’re meaningful? Do you need to clean up your computer desktop, or sift through any unsorted files? Rick Crume shares more tips for organizing digital files here.

Also spend some time backing up your research. The “LOCKSS” principle—Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe—encourages you to create multiple duplicate fail-safes. Make sure your backup files are up-to-date and still able to be read by your devices. At least one copy should be stored offsite from your home, so you might consider a new backup service.

3. Research Names

“What’s in a name?” Quite a lot for genealogists. First, middle and last names—even nicknames—can all contain family clues if you know what to look for:

First names were often reused from generation to generation, or chosen to honor a loved one. Some cultures used specific naming patterns, which contain clues to familial relationships and can help you distinguish your ancestor from someone with the same name.
Nicknames might not be obvious, as these norms have changed over the years. We’ve got lists of popular (and sometimes unexpected) nicknames for females and males.
Middle names, like first names, may repeat throughout families or honor a beloved relative, friend or even public figure.
Surnames were adopted at different times in different cultures. They often correspond to place names, occupations, a person’s characteristics or the name of the father. These are especially important to research, with many family historians organized their files by surname. We have guides to researching both unusual and common surnames.

Note that names could change over time—especially as immigrants arrived in a new country and assimilated. You may need to account for name variations, spelling errors and indexing hiccups.

4. Virtually Travel to Ancestral Places

If in-person travel isn’t viable for you, look for ways of digitally “visiting” the places important to your research. Some historic sites offer virtual tours, or you can tap powerful tech tools like Google Street View to take a walk down the street where your ancestor lived. Genealogist Lisa Lisson of “Are You My Cousin?” suggests checking with national visitors’ and tourism bureaus (which might highlight virtual tours), or hiring companies such as ToursByLocals.

Record-finding missions require less physical travel than they once did, too. Thanks to advancements in digitizing technology, many record-holding institutions (libraries, archives and so on) are making their collections available online. Those efforts might mean an in-person lookup is unnecessary. Check an organization’s website to see what digital collections it has, or consult WorldCat to see if the institution can send you materials via interlibrary loan.

Alternatively, you can learn more about your ancestor’s hometown by watching or reading well-researched documentaries, published histories and works of fiction: novels, poetry, movies and TV series.

5. Volunteer

Give back to the genealogy community! Here are some ideas, many of which don’t require you to brave the heat in the dog days of summer:

Index records at websites such as FamilySearch, making them more accessible for other researchers. FamilySearch lists other ways of getting involved here.
Visit your local genealogy society to see how you can help with their next meeting, publication or other project.
Take local gravestone photos and upload them to databases such as Find a Grave. You can even fulfill requests submitted by other Find a Grave users.
Contact your local representatives to advocate for records-management and access. Reclaim the Records files lawsuits on behalf of historians. And agencies such as the US Citizenship and Immigration Service solicit the public’s feedback before implementing changes, such as record-request fee increases.