How to Eat an Elephant - Part 2

In part one of this post, I talked about how to eat an elephant, one bite at a time. Move your enormous project along a little bit at a time and before long you'll be done. This really is the way I accomplish a lot of my genealogy and other goals. However, some people don't agree with that way of getting large projects done. They say, to expand on the eating an elephant analogy, that you'll soon get tired of elephant. Plus, once the dead elephant has been sitting around for a while, it begins to smell.

How to Eat an Elephant - Part 1

Here's an old riddle for you. How do you eat an elephant? The answer? One bite at a time. The same thing goes for any seemingly impossibly large task.

What big tasks do you have that you'd really like to accomplish, if only you had the time or the ability to actually get it done? One task that can be massive is scanning in several large boxes of photos you got from your parents or grandparents. With all those hundreds or thousands of photos, how can you possibly get them all done?

Family Search - Iowa Death Certificates

When was the last time you looked at the records available at Family Search? If it's been a while, I encourage you to go and look at the collections available. To do this, go to Search, Records, then click the link "Browse all published collections". Then, if you haven't visited in a while, click on "Last Updated" to sort them by the last updated date, newest first. When I did this, I saw that they had recently added "Iowa, Death Records, 1921-1940".

I found scans of official death certificates for a large number of people in my genealogy database, including several that I had paid for official copies of previously, such as my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Dunzinger Panther, and great-grandfathers Tom Doran and Charles Miller.