2015 in Review

2015 was a bad year for this blog as I did not post a single entry. This was, however, a great year for finding my dead with finding the burial locations of my 4x great-grandparents, Peter and Margaret (Schaeffer) Wetzel, being the highlight of the year.

Peter Wetzel

Margaret Rebecca (Schaeffer) Wetzel

Seeing time and time again where people are having difficulties finding their people buried in a particular Coal Township, PA cemetery, I decided that I wanted to photograph and record the GPS coordinates of all tombstones in this cemetery and make sure that everyone had a Find-A-Grave memorial with this information. I began this project during the summer and by late-fall had completed one of the smaller sections, which totaled almost 600 graves. This project was partly inspired by fellow Find-A-Graver, Robert David Miller, who has done the same in multiple location cemeteries and who’s data was a great help to me when I traveled multiple hours knowing that I would not have to blindly wonder around cemeteries hoping to find my ancestors.

2016 Goals

I want to do so many things in 2016 but know that so much will fall by the way-side as life continues and priorities will have to be made with the house and my grandmother being at the top of the list. My top five six genealogical goals for 2016 are, in no particular order:

1. Determine if and how the US Nahodil’s are related; this includes all variant spellings, Nahadil, Nochodil, etc. If you are a Nahodil descendant, please leave me a message or send me an email as I would love to connect.
2. Continue with the cemetery project that I started in 2015 with photographing and recording the GPS locations of all tombstones in a local cemetery.
3. Figure out what I am going to do now that Ancestry.com has discontinued its Family Tree Maker software and will cease supporting it at the end of the year. I have almost 20 years of data in this desktop software that I will now need to migrate to different software; this would be a perfect time for me to also clean up my facts and sources. I have already purchase Magic Roots and Legacy but do not like either as they do not have the capabilities that I require.
4. Delve deeper into the world of genealogical DNA testing. I have been involved with AncestryDNA for a few years now but find it limiting. I would like to get involved with testing through FamilyTreeDNA; this is more detailed and requires more knowledge of DNA than I currently have. I hope this avenue may be able to help prove or disprove some of the family stories about my Nahodil ancestors.
5. Consistently maintain and update this blog on a weekly basis. Writing does not come naturally to me so it seems to take so long to produce even a few short paragraphs. I really have to hand it to all the other bloggers about there that publish frequently and with such interesting posts that keep you coming back for more.
6. Begin gathering and organizing all the paperwork needed for my DAR application.

Well, off to play cards with my little old grandma.

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