52W Mark III – Week 52: Resolution

I never make New Year’s resolutions. In fact, I’m terrible at goal setting, although when there’s something I really want to achieve, I can set them. I just hate doing it. One goal I did set and, with this post, have achieved three times over, is completing Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors Challenge.

However, I don’t know if I have it in me to do a fourth full year of the Challenge, at least not in the way I’ve participated for three full years. The Challenge is becoming more difficult and much more work; some weeks it almost feels like a chore. Despite that, it’s remained worthwhile and fun. Otherwise, I doubt I’d have carried through.

The hardest part has been thinking of fresh and new things to discuss, explore, and share. It’s becoming more demanding to thing about things I haven’t already covered before – sometimes more than once (including this very topic, most recently on Week 44). Several times during this year’s Challenge I thought I had come up with something entirely new, only to discover partway through or near completion that I had already written about the same thing. There have been many weeks when I’ve fallen behind because of the difficulty of finding something to write about.

For several months now, I’ve been giving thought about what to do for 2025. Maybe I’ll pick 52 ancestors and write about them. Maybe starting with “one” and working my way through “fifty two”, I’ll write about something associated with the number of the week. Maybe I’ll create my own prompts. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be a regular weekly thing – maybe I could do a monthly post instead.

I know I’m not alone with these thoughts. After having substantially completed this entry but before clicking “Publish”, I looked at what some of the other 52 Ancestors participants posted on Amy’s Facebook group, Generations Cafe. There, Julie Turner Holmansky of Roots & Rabbit Holes shared a post, “Week 52, Resolution: Changing My Blog Up in 2025.” The title alone spoke to me, and her experience and thoughts really spoke to me.

Whatever I do, it will need to be something that is still regular and structured; without it, I can see a future where posts become fewer and farther apart in time, until it just peters out. I don’t want to stop blogging about genealogy. Not only has it kept me writing, I feel like it’s kept me connected to the genealogy community when I shared my posts on Facebook and Bluesky.

That all said, I’ve signed up for next year’s challenge. I would like to see the list of next year’s prompts before making any concrete decisions. There’s still two full weeks for me to think about it, especially since I started Christmas vacation about 45 minutes ago!

Rather than ending on uncertainty, let’s end on a high note. I think I need to recognize my accomplishment of completing three years’ worth of weekly blog entries. That’s 156 posts, not counting the occasional incidental genealogy post outside of the 52 Ancestors Challenge. I did it!!

Whether I’m doing Amy’s 52 Ancestors Challenge or some other thing with this blog in 2025, I know that I want to keep up the good habit of writing about my genealogy that this challenge inspired.