A Mind Map for the Genealogical Research Process

At the March general meeting, Donna Potter Phillips made a presentation on mindmapping, a visual technique that helps you brainstorm, organize, manage and track your ideas, and showed us how this can be beneficial to our genealogical research.

Not long after, I discovered that Mark Tucker of Think Genealogy had created, with some input from Elizabeth Shown Mills, a mindmap of the Genealogical Research Process. This innovative visual concept has the genealogy world in a buzz as it "combines the concepts found in The Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) from the Board for Certification of Genealogists and the many works of Elizabeth Shown Mills into a single visualization." Many individuals are printing this mindmap and laminating it as a research tool. I plan to make it available for my Online Genealogy students.

Mark has been interviewed by the Genealogy Guys (Drew Smith and George G. Morgan) and DearMYRTLE (Pat Richley) for their respective podcasts, and if you are interested in learning more about Mark and his mindmap you may wish to listen. You don't need an iPod or an MP3 player, but can listen directly online with your computer speakers or headphones. Broadband (cable and DSL) works best, but if you have dialup, you can download it (may take a while) to your computer and then listen using Windows Media Player or any other similar software.

You may also wish to download the mindmap and use it for your desktop wallpaper...you know, the picture you can use on your computer screen to replace the bland blue background when none of your programs are open? You can go here to find the size that fits your monitor.

Last, but not least: Mark has an excellent blog where he discusses technology as it relates to genealogy. His latest big presentation is to discuss The 10 Things Genealogy Software Should Do, which he recently showed via video on RootsTelevision.