Preparing for the March Ancestral Women 31-Day Challenge

Scrambling to get myself organised

Today Robin Stewart @genealogymatters has invited us to join in an Ancestral Women 31-Day Challenge. For each day of the month of March we will honour a different woman ancestor.

I think it is a marvellous idea and I wanted to quickly get myself organised. I have a number of other things on during the month and would not like to miss a day.

Using Wikitree I downloaded an ahnentafel ancestor list for myself and for my husband up to and including our great great grandparents. From the menu bar you go to the find menu, select the first option Apps, then Tree Apps, then Ahentafel Ancestor List.

I copied the lists into a spreadsheet (I use GoogleSheets), selected only the women in the list, and set up my columns.

Robin suggests

—Write the name (in ALL CAPS) of one of your women ancestors

—Add her birth year-death year (if known)

—Indicate her relationship to you.

To extract the names from the ahnentafel list, I started typing but Google Sheets quickly offered a formula which I was pleased to adopt.

=MID(A2,FIND(".",A2) + 1,FIND(":",A2) - 1 - (FIND(".",A2)))

I then wanted the names in upper case and used the formula

=UPPER(B2)

I added links to blog posts. There are several women I am yet to write about, some of them were already included in my plans for the April A to Z challenge.

My working spreadsheet

A final column was added using the formula

=CONCATENATE(C2," ",D2, ", my ",E2)

which produced

CHRISTA CHARLOTTE (BOLTZ) CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY 1939-2024, my mother

I now feel prepared to join in the daily challenge from tomorrow. I look forward to seeing the notes posted by others.