Get Organized
The better organized you are, the more success you're likely to have with your research efforts. If you know ahead of time where you stand in researching your family lines, you can identify rather quickly which records or other materials you need to find about a particular surname, location, or time frame. Knowing your gaps in information enables you to get right down to the nitty-gritty of researching instead of spending the first hour or two of your research rehashing where you left off last time.
To help yourself get organized, keep a research log — a record of when and where you searched for information. For example, if you ran a Google (www.google.com) search on the name Emaline Crump on January 1, 2007, and found 13 pages that you wanted to visit, record that in your research log. Also record when you visited those pages and whether they provided any useful information to you. That way, next time you're online researching your Crump ancestors, you know that you already ran a Google search and visited the particular resulting pages, so you don't have to do it again. (Of course, you may want to check back in the future and run the search again to see whether any new Crump-related sites turn up. Again, your research log can come in handy because it can remind you of whether you've already visited some of the resulting sites.)
You can print a copy of a research log at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints site at
www.lds.org/images/howdoibeg/Research_Log.html
Although this particular log is intended for offline research, you can modify it for your online pursuits — substituting the URL of a site you visit for the Location/Call Numbers section of the form. Or you can find a research table (which is basically a research log by another name) at the Genealogy.com site:
www.genealogy.com/00 0 0 00 02.html?Welcome=101642 669 0
A couple of other options are to create your own research log with a plain old notebook or a spreadsheet on your handy-dandy computer, or to use an already-prepared form that comes with your genealogical database (if available).
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