Did I Meet My Goals in 2025?

Inspired by Linda Stufflebean's post about hitting her genealogy goals in 2025, I thought I'd recap mine as well. How did I do? 

Here's what I had planned back in January in my post "Hitting the Target in 2025," and if I achieved my goals.

Attend the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy and participate in the 14-Day Research Like a Pro 14-Day Challenge

Accomplished both! 

• I really enjoyed Gena Philibert Ortega's SLIG course "Advanced Techniques: Material Culture Research Techniques for Genealogy" in January. What a wide-ranging group of lecturers were part of this course! It was a feast. It also inspired me to take an in-depth look at one piece of material culture that I own: my grandmother's Slovak catechism booklet. I wrote about that in several blog posts beginning with "Katechismus: Finding Meaning in Grandma's Artifact."
• For the Research Like a Pro 14-day Challenge, I had fun attempting to track down a marriage record for my third great-grandparents Mary Jane Sheridan and Philip Cassidy. I didn't ultimately find it, but the challenge helped me eliminate some sources for the record. I wrote about the challenge starting with "14-Day RLP Challenge: The Marriage Record Search Continues."

 

Focus on the Women

Also accomplished! I completed reading Sharon DeBartolo Carmack's book, Telling Her Story: A Guide to Researching and Writing about Women of the Past, and then embarked on a research project to find out more about my great-great-great grandmother Mary Jane Sheridan. I thought I could do this research quickly, but how wrong I was! It took many months to really explore her world and her life. But it resulted in a series of posts beginning with  "From Buffalo to North Evans, New York: Mary Jane Sheridan's Early Life." (My "applied book review" of Telling Her Story will be published in the Texas State Genealogical Society's journal Stirpes early in 2026.) I've begun a second such project on another ancestress, Mary Jane Darragh, who married Mary Jane Sheridan's son, Charles Cassidy. Stay tuned in 2026 for the results of that.

 

Clean Up Tasks

Mixed success!

Oh boy! I projected more progress on these tasks—email clean up, archive closet clean up, and download folder clean up—than I was able to accomplish, with one exception. 

 

• I was able to delete more about 7,500 emails from my inbox and it is now around 2,400, down from over 10,000! The better news there is that I've labelled the remaining emails so that they are at least categorized into what family line the email belonged to. 
• I did bits of clean up on the archive closet, but it's like a Pandora's box every time I go in there! Every box leads to wondering, researching, etc. I can't seem to part with many things. 
• Download clean up was also a slow go. I managed to get rid of some items and recoup some space, but still a long ways to go. I am also a big Snipping Tool user, which add a ton of images to the Pictures > Screenshots on my computer that also need attention.

Not on the 2025 bingo card, but fun developments all the same:

• Made contact with a couple of distant cousins who have been wonderful to work with. One was a lovely cousin in my Schiltz line who I met in New York, and the other was a cousin who reached out to me when he saw a blog post on our shared ancestor, Catherine Ryan Gilbride.
• Did several "spur of the moment" research projects at the request of others, including on John Schiltz for my NY cousin; on Bruno Albaugh, Civil War vet, for my aunt; and on my McAndrew line, spurred on by another cousin.
• Placed several articles in publications in research locales, including in Ontario Ancestors' Families, Lackawanna County Historical Society's History Bytes; and the Sheldon (NY) Historical Society's newsletter.  
• Took an amazing research trip to western New York and St. Catharines, Ontario, to nerd out on locales, history, churches, etc., for my Sheridan, Cassidy, Becker, Baker, Dyer, and other lines. (Thanks, Hubs!)
• Placed second in the blog category in the 2025 Texas State Genealogical Society's Writing Awards. 

What's in store for 2026? Well, I'll take a look at that in my next post.

In the meantime, what do YOU have planned for 2026? Drop a comment and let me know!

Happy New Year!

 

© Nancy Gilbride Casey, 2025. All rights reserved. 

Images: Main image, Canva; other images, rawpixel.com