Goals and Objectives

I’ve seen a lot of blog authors posting their goals for the week, month, year. What a fantastic idea! So, I am going to steal the idea I got from some other bloggers and post the goals we have for our family history research. One of the main reasons for this blog is to have another forum to document the research we are doing and I believe goals 101 says to write them down. Plus, if they are written down here in my blog for the whole world to see then that may help keep me accountable towards those goals.

I am going to take a little different approach as I mentioned in my Genealogy Time Management-Focus post. I have several goals in mind but most are not easy fixes and will take several different steps to reach. So, I am going to post our goals for the rest of 2011 and then each month (starting in August) I will post the objectives we want to accomplish that gets us closer to that goal.

Goals for the rest of 2011 are as follows and in no particular order:

1. Locate birth record for William Van Capen
2. Locate any military records for William Van Capen
3. Visit William Van Capen’s gravesite and memorial to his unit, the 3rd Aviation Instructor Center near Issuodun, France
4. Uncover specific locations/information of my wife’s line in Danzig, Poland and start planning a trip there for next year
5. Locate birth record for Joseph Lucas

Those seem to be some reasonable goals for the rest of this year. I am sure we will amend them as the year progresses but for now we can use these to maintain focus on our research.  Now I have to get to work on our objectives for August which is only a couple days away Yikes!

I’m curious how others set their goals and maintain accountability to those goals – if you have ideas and suggestions or want to share how you do it please leave a comment.

Hope you enjoy our journey and please help us stay accountable to our goals, objectives, and more importantly, our ancestors/descendants for whom we do this for.

Keep diggin’ for that family, Chris

Photo by: Angie Torres