Family History Writing Challenge – Week 1

The Family History Writing Challenge started on February 1, and I am off to a rocky start…well sort of.  Here’s the scoop for the first week.

On February 1, I wrote my blog post for the Surname Saturday theme, Surname Saturday: Rottman (Bavaria / Georgia / Iowa / Illinois).  It was 938 words (4.69% of my 200 words/day goal—hey, I’m ahead of the game!!) and took two hours of writing and formatting.  So it looked like I was off to a great start.

Then the weekend came, as did a stomach bug (that I’m still battling), so nothing got done.  By Tuesday, I was working on a blog post for the Family History Through the Alphabet theme.  Unfortunately, it really didn’t have anything to do with writing about my family history.  I spent two days and 17.5 hours writing and formatting a guide for how to use Diigo (a social bookmarking website) to build a genealogy resource toolbox.  In total, I wrote 5,297 words over those two days, but since it wasn’t about my family history, I don’t think it should count (but hey, I did write something genealogy-related, so that’s a good thing, right?).

Today, I wrote my blog post for the Genealogy By the States theme, and I made sure it had something to do with my family history.  So I wrote about my 11th great-grandfather, John Webster, and my 10th great-granduncle, Robert Treat, who both served as governor for the Colony of Connecticut.  I managed to crank out 801 words in five hours (part of that time included some additional research).  Again, I was over my 200 words/day goal by 4%.

I know the goal is to write a certain amount of words EACH day, and my goal was 200.  And although I only spent two out of seven days writing about my family history, I actually did surpass my overall goal.  For seven days at 200 words/day, I should have accumulated 1,400 words total.  I wrote a total of 1,739 for the week, so I feel like I am achieving my goal, just a little differently.  And, hey, add in the nearly 5,300 words that were genealogy-related, heck, I made the goal for the month (and then some) in just four days of writing! 

But unfortunately, that is not the point of the challenge.  The point is to write a little bit each day.  And now that I’ve gotten that big writing project out of my system, hopefully the stomach bug will follow and I can manage to get a little bit done each day for the rest of the month.