Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Update on my paper busting

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At the end of last month, I confessed how I’d found a stash of unfiled genealogy-related documents and vowed to go through them for 30 minutes a day until they were gone. I also had a rather large library of genealogy journals I want to at least skim.

In the comments of that post, a number of you said you’d join me in this paper-busting challenge. I thought I’d write a post today to let you know how it’s going for me and ask how it’s going for you.

Overall, for me, I’d say the challenge has been very worthwhile. I went out of town on the 15th, but before that I did manage to go through paper every day, though some days it was for as little as 15 minutes. I managed to resist going down rabbit holes or chasing bright, shiny objects that appeared while I did this. I kept my eye on the prize.

The best part is that I’ve kept very little paper. Much of my time has been spent making sure that I either already had downloaded the documents I had on paper (particularly those from the fat envelope sent to me by the Alabama Archives) or looking for and downloading easier-to-read copies of those documents.

So I scanned a few papers but I recycled the vast majority of them. I’m almost finished with the loose paper, but I still have all those journals to go through. I’m fairly confident I can finish by the end of the month.

I’m here to tell you, this feels great. And I’m so glad that most of the time I don’t have to deal with much genealogy paper. As I mentioned in a post last week, this project has been making me appreciate my digital lifestyle!

Discussing digital files on Genealogy Happy Hour

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I’m a guest on the most recent episode of Genealogy Happy Hour, published today. I had a great time talking with with hosts Amy Gabrill Lay and Penny Burke Bonawitz about organizing digital files in genealogy research (a favorite topic of mine!).

Genealogy Happy Hour is a fun monthly “genealogy podcast with two blondes and a bottle,” to quote its tagline. It’s mostly about genealogy and a little bit about wine. These are two of my favorite things to talk about (and participate in), so I jumped at the chance to talk with these fun folks when they invited me!

You can listen to Episode 38 here. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed doing it!

Census Predictor: What a terrific idea!

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Just three more years until the 1950 census is released to the public! I bet you’re as excited about it as I am. But do you know where your family members lived in 1950? In the mid-twentieth century, people started moving around more, rather than living around extended family for decades on end. I suspect that will make census research a little more difficult for genealogists. (Here’s an article from the Oxford Encyclpedia of American Social History on 20th-century internal migration, if you’re interested.)

OYFH reader Christy Underwood, who writes the blog Shaking My Family Tree, gave thought to how future genealogists might find her and her family in the more recent censuses. She created a Census Predictor form, which she has filled out for her family members who were alive since 1950. She’s posting them on her blog as a roadmap for researchers who follow her.

She explains the concept here, but the idea is that she creates a table in Word for each family member, with rows for each census year, providing the state, county, city and address of the person at the time. She also includes a cell for notes.

Here’s Christy’s post with her Census Predictor for herself. (That’s a snippet at the top of this post.)

I think this is genius. Wouldn’t it be great if we all did it? I’m planning to give it a try as soon as I finish my current paper-purging project (which is coming along quite nicely).

Are you game for creating census predictors for your family? Are you already doing something similar? I’d love to hear about it!

Christy, thank you for inventing the Census Predictor and sharing it with the world on your blog. And thank you for giving me the green light to write about it here!

Appreciating my digital lifestyle

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For the past week, as I promised I would in this blog post, I’ve been going through a largish stash of genealogy-related paper that I found when I went in search of some tax documents. I vowed not to continue my online research (where I print nothing and don’t have to process paper) until this paper backlog was gone.

I’ve spent 30 minutes a day reducing the paper pile ever since. I’ve recycled a lot and I’ve scanned some documents. (I’m proud of myself that I scanned on the spot, rather than creating a “to scan” pile to deal with later.) It’s starting to get kind of tedious, but I’m really thrilled with my progress.

But here’s the thing that really hit me these last couple of days. Dealing with paper genealogy records puts a real strain on my eyes. I had sent away to the Alabama Archives for the Confederate pension records of my second great grandfather, Laban Taylor Rasco (1844-1926). They had kindly sent a whole bunch of paper, most of it downloaded from Ancestry. I think when I received it, I was overwhelmed and probably daunted by the fact that much of it was comprised of black-and-white prints of documents that were on yellowed paper at the time they were digitized. Very hard to read. That’s why the papers landed in the pile.

I’ve spent the last couple of days with these Alabama pension records, looking to see which of them I already have on my hard drive and then going to Ancestry to download better copies of the documents I didn’t already have digitally. (And I’m downloading a bunch of new-to-me pension documents from that collection at Ancestry while I’m at it.) In order to compare what I have (or what I find) with the paper version, I have to squint, dust off my magnifying glass, or move the paper to better light in order to read it. My eyes aren’t getting any better with age and this not my idea of fun.

Once the documents are on my hard drive, I can simply zoom in on them to read them. So easy. So painless. And a huge reason I favor digital over paper.

This little project has shown several benefits already: A reduction in paper hanging around my house (yay!) and an appreciation for the decision I made several years ago to eschew paper. I’m so glad I’m doing it!

If any of you who are joining me on this quest have enjoyed some benefits, please share in the comments!