Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

My pause on searching: Easier said than done

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Just over a week ago, in my post called Searcher vs. researcher, I vowed to get through the backlog of documents I had downloaded but never processed and to do no online searching until the backlog was gone. I’ll confess to you that my resolve not to search dissolved the very first day.

My curiosity about certain things that came up while I was processing my backlogged documents could not be satisfied by merely jotting down a note on my follow-up task list. So I quickly amended the vow I’d made to myself. Now, I try not to do any searching and downloading but when I do, I process the new document during the session in which I download it.

This is working out well. I have managed to resist the temptation to search but every now and then I go for it. (For example, when I’m processing a Washington state marriage certificate and I know that Washington marriage license applications, which have more interesting information, are also easily found.)

Today, in processing an 1880 census, a grandchild appeared living with his widowed grandmother and I need to verify whose parent that grandchild is before I can add the grandchild to my genealogy software and consider the census document processed. That’s going to require a little searching online tomorrow and I’m okay with that.

So far, this backlog-busting project is going well. I’ve reduced my backlog by 25 documents in the last ten days and have 78 documents in my backlog remaining. It’s feeling good!

My evolution from paper to digital

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I just re-read a blog post I wrote on August 12, 2012, just a couple of months after I started this blog, called How I organize my family history research. It outlines how I organized my research back in the day, when I kept everything on paper. If you have all your genealogy documents on paper, you might find it helpful.

What struck me in reading this six years later is that, with the exception of using Reunion software, I no longer do anything I outlined in that article. Wow!

Specifically, I don’t print documents. Therefore I don’t file documents. And I almost never access the documents I printed and filed six years ago. If I wanted to see them and didn’t already have them filed on my hard drive, I would just go online and download them. The exceptions are the few documents I have that were mailed to me. And I scan those whenever I come across them.

Am I better at organizing my genealogy research now than I was in 2012? Not necessarily. I’m a professional organizer and I did a great job of organizing my papers back then. But is my current system better than my 2012 system? For me, the answer is unequivocally yes.

My digital filing system is easier, more convenient and less labor-intensive than my paper filing system was.

If you’re curious about my evolution of paper to digital, check out these posts:

It’s so fun having a blog so that I can look back and see how things have changed over the years. This transition from paper to digital has undoubtedly been a positive change for me!

My electronic file system continued to evolve and in 2021 I published an Orderly Roots Guide called How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow that provides detailed information on how I organize my own genealogy research, which is now 100 percent digital. The downloadable pdf is 37 pages and available for $19.99.

Photo by Tom Woodward via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

No need to settle for bad scans

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I do a lot of my research online and I’m so grateful for the amazing digitization that has been done of genealogy documents. I’m frequently astounded by the high quality of the scans. It’s a little hard to imagine a genealogy life before this digitizing. (Hats off to those of you who did genealogy research prior to the internet!)

But every now and then I come across a document that was poorly scanned. It happened recently when I downloaded from Ancestry a death certificate for my great grandfather’s brother, Joseph Taylor Rasco (1872-1964). It’s a typewritten death certificate, which is always nice. But the scan was blurry. It was clear enough that I knew it was him, but too blurry to glean information without difficulty.

So I decided to look to see whether Family Search had a different scan of the same document. A few clicks later, I pulled up a crystal clear version of the same document.

Here they are side by side (click the photo to see them larger):

It was a good reminder to me to look a little harder if I come across a scan of a document whose quality makes it hard to read. I may not find a better one, but it’s worth a try!

 

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash

Searcher vs. researcher

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Genealogy searcher vs researcherI’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between being a genealogy searcher and being a genealogy researcher. It’s so much fun to go online and track down documents and attach them to a tree or download them. (I know some people like to print them, but not me.) Because so many searchers attach documents to Ancestry trees without evaluating them we end up with an alarming number of inaccurate trees there.

That’s being a searcher. In my opinion, we’re not really researchers unless we analyze the documents we find so that we know they pertain to the person we’re researching, then go through them with a fine-toothed comb, extracting information and storing that data somewhere–with a source citation.

As I’ve written in my post on how I process a downloaded document, I have a digital workflow for the documents I find online, after I determine they belong to my ancestor. In short, I create a source citation and analyze and extract all information from the document and enter that information into my genealogy software. (I use Reunion). I then file the document. On a good day, I process each document as soon as I find it. That’s always my goal.

But the reality is that, especially since I tend to research in short spurts (like 30 minutes a day), I sometimes end up with documents on my hard drive that I’ve downloaded but not yet processed. That’s been happening a lot recently. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I have over 100 documents that I have downloaded that are hanging out on my hard drive, waiting for me process. (At least I changed the file name when I downloaded the documents, so I know at a glance what they are.)

The thing is, these documents won’t do me any good until I process them. I need to read and analyze them and add all facts (with source citation) to my genealogy software in order to benefit from them. But it’s so hard to resist searching, especially when search possibilities pop to mind as I read the downloaded documents.

I want to be a researcher, not a mere searcher. So here’s my vow:

Until the backlog is gone, I will not download any more genealogy documents to my hard drive. I also won’t go to any libraries and bring home paper documents. When searches pop to mind, I will store them in the appropriate follow up notebook in  Evernote to look at when the backlog is gone.

I’m hoping to take a research trip to Kentucky in October. This adds extra urgency to my resolve to get rid of my backlog. You can bet I’ll post here when the backlog is gone!

Do any of you have this particular challenge? Let me know if you’d like to join me in resolving to do no more searching until your backlog of documents you’ve already found is gone. I’d love the company!