Genealogy Goals: 2019

It's 2019, y'all! And somehow, it's already the middle of January, that month of goal-setting and fresh starts and hopeful ideals. As I wrote in my last post, I learned last year that the mental load of my job means I don't always have a lot of mental energy (or sometimes, time) to work on my genealogical research. I tried to set goals for how many posts I'd write each month, but that definitely fell by the wayside. And you know what? That's okay. I still did research, I still wrote about (some of) it, and the project at large continues!

This year I'm setting no such goals for posts per month. In fact, I'm not setting any kind of SMART goals for my research and writing. Instead, I'm simply setting a research focus:

This year, I want to learn as much as I can about the siblings of my 2x Great-Grandmother Scoatney Scott Cooper.

This is work I've already started on. Last year, I did a fair amount of exploration around the surprising story of her sister Masonia Scott Worthen, who ended up first in a logging town in Washington State with several of her sons and then in Portland, Oregon for the remainder of her life. Through her story, I was able to learn about another sibling, a brother named James Solomon Scott. Researching him has created leads for several other siblings, and I'm excited to continue digging. These men and women were born between the 1850s and the 1880s, a time of radical change in American society, including the Civil War, Reconstruction and the roll-back of rights known as Redemption. Imagine what they saw and experienced in their lifetimes.

Through their stories, I've got a number of interesting topics to explore:

- logging in Washington State, especially African American loggers
- African Americans in World War I
- meatpacking in Portland
- Black Portland
- Pullman Porters and African American railworkers
- Delta Sigma Theta in Oregon
- Blacks in higher education
- Reconstruction Georgia
- and much more

And there might be opportunities to take research trips to several places, including:

- Portland, Oregon
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Chicago, Illinois
- and Nashville, Tennessee

Hopefully, by the end of this year, I'll have shared a number of research posts, as well as a number of Timeline Biographies (found here) for you all, my family and friends.

And, as always, I hope that if you all have any info to add to the conversation, you'll share it with me here or through any of the other ways you know how to contact me.

Onward!