52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge: Let’s Get Started!

If you need a good reason to start writing your ancestor’s stories, let me introduce you to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge created by Amy Johnson Crow.  Amy has engineered prompts for several years to stimulate our brains and help us brainstorm story ideas. I participated in 2022 and wrote several blog posts about my ancestors. I loved the motivation to write and discovered some neat things about people I thought I knew!

2025 brings a new opportunity to participate in the challenge and, with it, the new tool of Artificial Intelligence. I spent many hours in 2024 exploring ways to use AI in my research, and this year, I plan to have it help me write my ancestor stories. I’ll share some tips I’m learning along the way. If you want to join me, sign up on Amy’s website, and you’ll receive a prompt each week in your email inbox.

The prompt for this week is appropriately “Let’s Get Started!” I’m interpreting this as my “getting started in genealogy” story. I share this often at the beginning of presentations and wrote a bit about it in a blog post about getting started one paper at a time a few years ago, but here is more about my beginnings in this thing I love.

Setting a Foundation

My parents set the foundation for my research in the 1960s. My dad has joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and with the emphasis on family history, he began writing letters to “the folks,” as he called his dad, aunts, and cousins. He gathered details about births, marriages, and deaths from those letters. Once those sources were exhausted, he and my mother began to do research with the aid of a fellow church member who excelled at genealogy research. I was best friends with her daughter and remember peeking into her mom’s genealogy room full of books and papers.

My parents continued their research sporadically through the 70s, mainly in the winter when my dad wasn’t busy farming from sunup to sundown. One treasure they captured on cassette tape was my grandfather telling the family story. My mother transcribed it using her typewriter, and we’ve used it to track the family throughout Oklahoma, Texas, and California, where they migrated often. The best part of the recording is the end when my grandfather’s voice becomes less stilted, and his southern accent comes through. This is where he started telling funny stories about what happened to himself and his children during their growing-up years.

My Turn

My parents purchased their first computer in the 1990s, like many of us, but my dad had difficulty reading from the monitor, and when I suggested that I take over one of the family lines, he decided to give all of his work to me! My family had moved to Highland, Utah, from Seattle, and the time seemed right to tackle genealogy. I met my parents at the Salt Lake City airport, where they were leaving for Hawaii, and my dad gave me all his research in a suitcase.

When I arrived home, I expectantly opened the suitcase and found a lot of papers and file folders. I had no idea what to do, but our church was sponsoring a family history fair, which seemed like a good place to start. I hoped to attend several classes to get ideas about setting up files, getting organized, and getting started. Many of the presenters were local Accredited Genealogists who volunteered their time to teach foundational classes.

Sitting in class after class, I received many ideas – probably the most important at the time was what to do with all that paper in my dad’s suitcase! I learned how to organize my paper files (digital files were a thing of the future at that time): surname > state> county. This made perfect sense to me and I spent many hours reviewing the papers and logging them in my files. I created a research log for the folder where I noted the item, the date, the repository, and some details. I still pull out those paper files, although I’m working to convert them to digital.

Starting Research

Of course, after filing the papers and entering the known information into my genealogy database – Personal Ancestral File (PAF) – I wondered what to do next to start filling in the holes in the family tree. Luckily, the family history fair was held again the next winter and continued for several years. I took classes in online research, source citations, locality research, and more. Nicole had caught the bug with me, and we spent many Saturdays at the Family History Library (now FamilySearch Library) in Salt Lake City. We scoured the books for our ancestors and gradually added more to our family tree. This was an exciting and fulfilling time.

Looking back, I can see that we had several things in our favor: a foundation set by my parents, those local classes, and the library. We also had each other and, to this day, love sharing our findings. Being able to teach others through our blog posts, books, courses, and podcasts is our way of giving back to all those who went before us.

Best of luck in all your genealogical research!