Do you watch Connie Knox’s GenealogyTV YouTube channel? Connie posts videos every week and they are always educational, helpful, and as she says in her tagline, help you “Go Further, Faster... and Factually... with your Family History Research.” (we love us some alliteration 😁).
Her video from July 26, 2024 was so perfect for me too! Perfect in its timing (because I’ve been restructuring my genealogy research approach) and perfect in its content (because she shows how she uses emojis as visual indicators). I IMMEDIATELY put her concept into action!
In the video, Connie describes a makeover she is doing for her direct ancestor profiles on her Ancestry family tree. As you can see in the image, there are different emojis she’s using to indicate where she is in her research phase for each person. How cool!
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve decided to reimagine my approach for genealogy data for each person in my tree. And you know what, I’ve decided I’m going to use emojis too! In my case, I am using them a little differently, but they will help me visually know at what stage I am in my research for a person.
I use RootsMagic as my home base for my genealogy data, thus, that is where I am putting my emojis. I am also choosing different emojis than Connie.
See those purple plus signs? They have a meaning. Like Connie, I have four different emojis I will be using, but mine are: ➕, 👨👩👧👦, 📚, and 🔁. Want to know what they mean? I will explain in my next post! (hint: it’s based on an approach used by the US Black Heritage Project at WikiTree).
But for now, this is so neat. I’m excited by the opportunity to have these visual cues in my tree to help me as I navigate all around it. Thank you Connie for the idea! I regularly add emojis when I journal and create my yearly family scrapbooks, but this is neat to think about for my genealogy database.
Do you have any visual indicators that you use?
Oh, yes, Taneya! They're SO powerful, especially because you can both use them as shortcuts for concepts or pending tasks, AND for search.
Here on Substack they just added search of notes and while it doesn't appear that they're using "#" hashtags for any special function in search, the ability to search posts, people, publications, and notes is fantastic. Search for 🥹 or 🥰 or 😮💨 for example... interesting, eh? 🧐