Tuesday's Tip: Act Like You're Moving

Photo Credit: Chris Schauflinger

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a tweet or two about my move to a new place. I've spent the last month packing up the old house, hauling all my family's stuff around the corner to the new house, and I'm now unpacking the boxes that are scattered from one end of the house to the other.

I'll be honest with you. I hate moving. However, I have to admit that there are some benefits, mainly that you find things that you forgot you had. In packing up our old house, I came across a surprising amount of boxes that were still packed from our move three years ago. Apparently, we had decided these items boxes held non-essential items and just stored them.

Now that I'm starting to go through not only the boxes I packed at the old house, but also some of the boxes from the previous move, I've made some discoveries. These include

• Several envelopes of pictures
• Funeral cards and obituaries for various family members and friends
• My notes from an interview with my grandfather on his side of the family tree
• A notebook filled with genealogy notes, questions to ask specific family members and possible avenues of future research
• Copies of vital records that I thought I had, but couldn't find
• A hand-drawn family tree I had done in my teens

Do you have boxes, bins or crates packed away in your garage or attic? What do you have packed away that might be helpful in your genealogy research? To borrow a phrase from an Ancestry.com commercial: "You don't have to know what you're looking for, you just have to start looking."