As age takes its toll, I find myself increasingly spending time making lists. Today's task will be to make lists of my family history projects: those completed - a happy and lengthening list! those in process which are in my hands; those in process which are in the hands of others. Hmm. Even writing this plan makes me feel slightly more in control! This is good.
I need the list of the completed projects (with dates of completion) because of the ongoing need to cross-reference one project with others, and the challenge of simply FINDING my copy of the finished work to check the date. You don't imagine I would REMEMBER the date, do you? So I will get out all the finished volumes, sort out the extra copies (and perhaps figure out what to do with the extra copies) and make a master list of the books, their completion dates and the number of copies on hand, perhaps adding thoughts on those extra copies. (There aren't many of them, and most are incomplete in some way. Perhaps they are destined to be recycled, but that is PAINFUL to contemplate.)
The list of the unfinished projects which are in my hands is short. I realized why with David's and my completion of the "Receipt Book" project last week. When there is a lot of text in a project there is a dire need for other eyes to do the proofreading, and with the most recent project there were only two pages of text. I trust I caught all the errors myself. Longer pieces - not so much.
The list of the unfinished projects in the hands of others - aye, there's the rub. The "others" are my close kin, and I love them dearly, but the reality is their priorities and mine are not compatible.
Two weeks since I started this blog. The "Receipt Book" project, at least the "commercial art" part of it is finished and copies have been mailed out. The "receipt" part remains to be worked on. This is the fastest completion time I have had for any family history project; a few weeks, as opposed to something like two decades for my father's book, the first project I worked on. Maybe it went swiftly because the lion's share of the work was David's. His thing is images, mine is words. This book was about 98% image.