Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Plans to Travel for On-site Genealogy Research

I keep falling behind on my genealogy posts!  I have all these great plans, and they somehow don't materialize.  But I can always start again at catching up, as I am doing tonight with Randy Seaver's post for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here), is:

1.  Do you have plans to travel to do on-site genealogy research?  [Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting topics!]

2.  Write your own blog post, or add your response as a comment to this blog post or in a Facebook Status post or note.

Here are my thoughts.

Let me start off by saying that I definitely don't believe I can do all my research online.  That means I have to look at doing on-site research myself or hiring someone else to do it.  And I really like doing my own research.

I have so much New Jersey research where I am sure that the archives will have information that is helpful; not everything has been filmed by the LDS Church.  So many of my family lines (my paternal grandmother's side of the family) were in New Jersey for centuries.  I still have to find my great-grandmother Amelia Gibson's parents and family, and my 4x-great-grandfather Joel Armstrong's parents (is he my connection to practicing Quakers?).  And I want to see the farm schedules from the census to learn more details about what my farming ancestors were doing.  It wouldn't be practical to hire someone for this research because there's so much to do, with one piece of information leading to another and another.  I need to find some time to go back east, stay at my sister's, and make daily trips to the state archives.

Notwithstanding how many records and indices Reclaim the Records has managed to get from New York City, there's still a lot more to see, and my mother's side of the family lived there for more than a century.  In some ways it might be more practical to hire someone who is more experienced with the repositories to do that research, but it would be far more enjoyable to do it myself.  I think I still have cousins in NYC; maybe I can sleep on a couch and make that my base of operations.

Those are my big chunks of research where there's a lot to be done.  I could do research in just about every state in this country because I have cousins everywhere, but most states have only a few relatives to research.

Do I have actual plans for any of this research?  No, not currently, but I could and I probably should.

Now, the Ukrainian research I would like to conduct on my mother's side, maybe that I don't want to do on site myself.  I think that's a good candidate for hiring a researcher to do it for me, at least for the immediate future.  The research in Moldova and Belarus also might be served better by hiring someone, rather than going in person.