Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Making time for family history research

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I love doing family history research. I really do. I’m also trying to figure out ways to integrate it into my organizing business, so technically it’s work. So why haven’t I done it in more than a week?

I can make excuses for why I haven’t made time to do any research. A week ago I returned from a week-long trip and I jumped right back in to full client load. My desk is a mess. (Embarrassing, but true.) But here’s the thing: since I’ve been home I’ve managed to catch up on most of the TV shows I recorded in my absence. I finished reading a book. I watched a couple of college basketball games.

It really does come down to priorities. (Priority management is a more accurate phrase than time management.)

As I contemplated the fact that I frequently close up shop and leave my desk for the day before I do any research, I realized a few things:

  • The messy desk really does get in the way. (Note to self: Clear it off every night like you used to!)
  • The time I thought I’d try to do it every day, 5 pm, isn’t conducive. Now that it’s winter, it’s dark at that time. I like a lot of light when I’m squinting at old handwriting.
  • If I’m running late trying to get the rest of my work done, I continue working past 5 pm and research is sacrificed.
  • I need to make it very, very easy to start doing the research. One way I might do that is to outline for myself at the end of each research session what I want to research at the start of the next one. Then it’ll be as simple as grabbing a file from the cart stored in a closet a few feet away, rather than rolling out the whole cart. And it gives me immediate focus.
  • I need to examine my priorities for my time and see where this research fits in. Is it more important than keeping up with social media or whittling my inbox down to zero? If so, I should do it before I do those daily tasks.
  • It’s important to recognize that I don’t need hours at a time to do research. As little as 30 minutes can glean some great results.

The process of writing this blog post has given me new resolve. I have a lighter day tomorrow and I’m going to make sure I do some research, earlier in the day. And I’ll make a note at the end of the session about how I want to start the next session.

I think I’ll take a few minutes to clear off my desk right now.

To print or not to print?

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questionmarkI admit it. I like to print out source documents I find online. When I see a census record for an ancestor, for example, I have an overwhelming desire to print it out and put it in that ancestor’s paper file. That system has worked well for me, though of course there’s potential for all those printed records to take up a lot of space.

Yesterday, I was listening to Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems podcast, specifically the Digitize, Organize, and Archive episode in which she interviews Denise May Levenick about organizing family memorabilia and genealogy records. Listening to that, I was inspired to take their advice and try to squash my compulsion to print and instead save these documents as pdfs.

I thought I’d do that today, but I’m realizing that I take some comfort in having paper records. I know my house could catch on fire and the records would vanish. But I think I have more faith in my house remaining unburned than I do in my hard drive not failing. As I’m typing this, though, I know that’s not the true reason. (I back up to an external hard drive and I have an online backup service.) I think the real reason is that my paper files are more organized than my electronic genealogy files.

Saving pdfs rather than printing would require me to clean up my electronic act. And that would be a good thing. As I see it, I’d need to come up with a good naming system and file hierarchy. I’m a Mac user and I typically rely on its excellent search functionality to help me find what I need on my hard drive. But I can imagine that pinpointing specific records in a search might be more difficult.

One advantage I can see to saving these documents on my hard drive is that sometimes I’m doing research in the absence of my paper files. I might be using my laptop upstairs, while my file cart resides downstairs. I might be at a library or a conference. I can certainly see advantages to saving, not printing.

So I’m going to continue printing, but only until I get my head around doing a better job with organizing my hard drive. (Step 1: Read Denise May Levenick’s book, How to Archive Family Keepsakes, which offers information on file naming protocols.) Once I clean up my electronic genealogy files, I think I’ll try saving, rather than printing, and see if I can feel comfortable.

 

Like a dog with a bone

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One of the reasons I frequently feel overwhelmed with my family history research is that there are so many different lines to explore and people to research. I’ll often jump from one to another in the course of a research session.

But for the last few days, I’ve been focusing on one person, my father’s paternal grandfather’s father, George Washington Adams. I can’t seem to verify his birth date and death dates and his name is common enough that there quite a few red herrings out there. I’ve been trying various online sources and scratching my head over this. I’ve made some assumptions along the way that I realize might not necessarily be right. I think I’ve found his Civil War records and if I’m right on that, then that’s him living in the National Home for Disabled Soldiers on the 1930 census.

Usually when I get frustrated, I move on to another ancestor. But this one has kept gnawing on my brain, like a dog gnawing on a bone. I haven’t been able to move on.

But I think I found him listed on an index of Illinois deaths from the Illinois Death Certificates Database. I have to write to the Vermilion County Clerk to request his death certificate, but the index included the death certificate number, which gives me hope. When it arrives I hope that it will confirm that this is my guy. We shall see.

Now I just have to wait for the death certificate. (I mailed the request this morning.) So I’m going to put George Washington Adams out of my mind and move on to another family member. I think giving my brain a break from this little frustration will do me good!

The genealogy research log

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I’ve been really bad about keeping a genealogy research log. I’ve seen references to the importance of them and I even tried keeping a handwritten one in my genealogy spiral notebook when I first started back on this journey earlier this year. But that soon fell by the wayside.

Just this week, as I was thinking about my research while using the elliptical trainer at the gym. (It turns out that the elliptical machine and the shower are where my great ideas come to me–and they’re both places where it’s hard to write those ideas down.) I realized that a research log would be very helpful to avoid duplicating research and to see where I’d left off.

I thought about how the log really needed to be searchable, so it should probably be a spreadsheet. I’m really not a spreadsheet kind of gal–they seem so restricting to me. And I pondered if I could get away with it being in a Pages document. (I’m a Mac user–Pages is the Mac’s version of Word.)

I intended today to fool around with creating a Pages template for a research log. But then I opened the January/February 2013 issue of Family Tree Magazine and read an article called Logging On, all about creating a research log. It made me realize that sorting was as important as searching for my log. So I guess I’ll be using a spreadsheet. I could use Numbers (Mac’s version of Excel) or Google Docs. Call me nuts, but I have a distrust of the cloud. I want this info stored on my computer. So I’m going with Numbers.

Happily, the article also gave some really clear guidelines on setting up the log, including suggested column headings. (They include date, name, record or resource, info sought, source citation, etc.) Also included in the article is a sidebar with a list of blogs and websites with how-tos on setting up a research log. One really kind of excited me. It’s Miriam’s Census Spreadsheet, in which Miriam has created a great way to keep track of what census and vital records data she has found for her ancestors. I think that in addition to a research log, I’m going to try to create a similar spreadsheet.

Setting up the spreadsheet for my research log will be the easy part. The hard part will be creating the habit of using it. I teach workshops on building habits and routines, so I might be a step ahead of the game. I know that I’m very capable of creating habits. (I whittle my email inbox down to zero every day and go to the gym three times a week, for instance.) The first challenge will be remembering to do use the log. Something as simple as a sticky note might help with that.

Intellectually, I understand the value of the research log. I think once I start using it, I’ll quickly experience its value. And that reward will help me create the habit.

December 28 is a great day to decide to create a new habit. I’m hopeful that within a few months I can proudly say that I keep a genealogy research log without even thinking about it!