Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Inherited items: From overwhelm to order

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As I mentioned recently, last month I shipped seven boxes of photos and documents that had belonged to my father and aunt, both of whom have moved into care facilities. Actually, one of the boxes contained just a few large items, so it’s really six small-size moving boxes full of small items. They arrived last week and I vowed to not let them linger.

But looking at the unopened boxes, I felt overwhelmed about dealing with all the stuff. I told myself that I would go through a box a day for a week and I’m happy to say that I have been able to do that. I have one box left, which I plan to go through today.

My plan was to take everything out of the large boxes and sort the items so that they feel approachable.

So far I’ve been able to follow the plan! I used Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the BOX approach, which I had used when I was dealing with a box of stuff I brought home from Walla Walla in 2020. That gave me a great framework for storing the sorted items until I can start going through them. Using Step One of Stacy’s methodology (adapted a little for my current needs), I divided the contents of the boxes into these categories:

  • Documents
  • Narratives and correspondence
  • Photos
  • Framed photos
  • Albums

I put the albums and framed photos in a bin to go through later. (But I did enjoy looking at them while I was emptying the boxes.) Once I get through the last box, I’ll turn my attention to the documents, as well as narratives and correspondence. I’ll employ Stacy’s Step Two, in which I’ll select 10 items at a time–the ones that interest me most–and scan them, then process them as I would anything I found online. After the first ten are finished, I’ll go back to the documents and select ten more and so on.

The photos will be a little trickier for me, but my plan is to scan them, share them with relatives and keep the originals stored in an archival box or boxes. I’ll do the same, in turn, with the framed photos and albums.

Incidentally, the unruly bunch in the photo at the top of this post is my father and aunt, with their parents, grandparents aunts and uncles. I’m not sure who all the kids are (yet). I had never seen that photo before this week and now, thanks to this project, I’m able to recognize my great grandparents, William Reese Rasco (1878-1957) and Luella Watts Rasco (187-1953), in photos. That makes me really happy.

Having a methodology to deal with the contents of these boxes is giving me huge peace of mind. (Thank you, Stacy Julian!) Having places to put the sorted items after I go through each big box has been hugely helpful in keeping me from feeling overwhelmed. I’m excited to go through the final box so I can started processing documents. I found a number of death certificates, birth certificates, diplomas, passports and newspaper articles that I know I’ll enjoy going through.

This has been a great focus for this month’s 30 x 30 challenge!

Join me for a June 30 x 30 challenge?

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May was brutal for me in terms of being able to do genealogy research. I had so many family obligations (among my living family members) that I couldn’t pay any attention to my deceased family members! But I really want to get some family history exploration done this month, so I’m having a 30 x 30 challenge. In addition to reacquainting myself with my family tree, I hope to be sifting through the boxes I sent myself last month from my father’s and aunt’s homes after they moved. In June, I plan to focus on the documents, putting the photos aside for later.

How about you? Would you like to join me for a 30 x 30 challenge? I am committing to spending an average of 30 minutes a day for the next 30 days on genealogy research and organizing. I want to at least something each day (even if it’s not a full 30 minutes) because I find daily effort so valuable in getting back into the swing of things. I’ll be keeping a spreadsheet and I’ll be really happy if I log 900 minutes (15 hours) over the course of the month. Actually, I’ll be happy if I do something every day, even if it doesn’t add up to 15 hours.

If you’d like in on the challenge, just say so in the comments. Mid-month, I’ll post an update post on my progress and invite you to share yours.

Are old photos hiding from you?

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I just spent a really rewarding nine days in my hometown of Walla Walla, Washington. I helped my 91-year-old father, Gene Adams, move into a lovely assisted living place. He’s really happy there and I’m feeling so good that he’s content and safe.

As part of my time in Walla Walla, I emptied his condominium so we could put it on the market. He and my mother bought the condo in 1991 and while my dad wasn’t a big accumulator of stuff (thank goodness), there was a basement storage room that I had not spent much time in. When it came time to empty the storage room, I discovered box upon box of old family photos and other ephemera. (One of the photos was the one of my brothers and me taken in about 1965 that’s at the top of this post.)

I was simultaneously thrilled and disappointed to find these photos. Thrilled because I can’t wait to carefully go through them. Disappointed because I would have loved to have gone through them with my mother when she was alive. She died in 2015 at 82 from Parkinson’s disease and in her last years wasn’t very mobile. We could have had a lovely time talking about and organizing these photos together.

So that leads me to a question for you: Are there family photos tucked out of sight in your home or in the homes of your relatives? Could you uncover them and enjoy them with your family members? It might be worthwhile to think about who you might ask and, of course, what you might do with them.

In addition to the boxes that were in my dad’s condo’s storage room, I also went through boxes of photos and documents that had come from my aunt’s home. When she moved into a care facility in February, I had these boxes delivered to my father’s condo to go through later. “Later” came very quickly! There are some treasures there as well. (And there were a lot of papers that she didn’t need to keep that added to my task. I blogged about that on my organizing blog yesterday.)

In all, I had seven boxes shipped to my home from Walla Walla. They should arrive at the end of the week. I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t overwhelmed at the prospect of how I’m going to deal with them. My plan right now is to use Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box methodology to get started. I’m so grateful to have that starting point.

Keep an eye out for more posts as I go through this stuff! I’m sure it will be an organizing challenge that perhaps we can all benefit from.

1950 Census clue: Sheet 71 and up

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I spent the day with the 1950 U.S. Census on April 1, as anticipated, and I was bleary eyed (and brain dead) by afternoon. But I had a great time. When I found my teenage mother (who passed away in 2015) on the census living with her parents and little brother, I got goose bumps.

I had done a pretty good job of finding enumeration districts (EDs) in advance, which was good, since the search function worked for just one of my people. I had the joy of finding my grandparents when I wasn’t looking for them. (I was looking for my aunt, who was married and in her own home by then and just stumbled upon my grandparents.)

On April 1, I found father (in his fraternity house at Whitman College), my mother living with her parents and grandmother, my paternal grandparents, and two sets of great grandparents. I didn’t find my aunt (my father’s sister, who is still living) though I browsed the EDs I thought she might be living in page by painstaking page. And I also searched in vain for my father’s paternal grandmother. (I’m determined to keep looking!) I’ve processed the documents I found, but I haven’t had a chance to do much more looking. I’m excited to get back to it.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen a lot of “No One At Home” entries on the pages you were looking at. I wanted to share a tip I learned only after I had done all that browsing. For every enumeration district, no matter how many sheets it has, the names of those folks who were re-canvassed after not being at home starts on Sheet 71. An ED might have 30 pages to browse, but it might skip from sheet 26 to sheet 71. So if you find your person’s address and it says No One At Home, I suggest you skip to sheet 71 (and beyond) to if they’re there. (And take comfort in knowing that sheets 26 to 70 in this example aren’t missing.)

I’m going to go back to some of the EDs I browsed looking for my aunt and great grandmother and make sure I pay especially close attention to Sheet 71 and up. I was pretty bleary eyed by the last pages of any ED and I’m hopeful perhaps I just missed them.

If you’d like to read more detail about how enumerators were instructed to handle No One At Home, check out this detailed blog post from the History Hub, the National Archives’ crowdsourced platform: 1950 Census: Enumerated Out-of-Order – “Callbacks” and Others on Page 71 and Up.

Happy hunting!