This year has been a very busy one for me so far, and one of the major, time-consuming projects has been preparing to lead a tour for the Iowa Genealogical Society to London. I head to Des Moines of 30 April to meet up with the group and we depart on 1 May for Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and fly to London's Heathrow Airport.

The preparation for this trip has required working with a number of genealogical repositories to arrange in advance for reader's cards and introductory tours of these facilities. I also wrote a forty-page guide for the group. This guide describes the repositories and the types of records available at each one, offers practical travel tips, recommends tourist venues, and includes a request for goal sheets.

In the first of two columns, I want to discuss the importance of setting goals for a long-distance genealogical research trip. Perhaps the trip is a once-in-a-lifetime visit to your ancestors' country of origin or a trip to the place where they ultimately settled. Regardless of the destination, you have to have research goals, and I hope this series gives you some positive ideas for strategically planning your trips...

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