Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick Tip #36: Do it now!

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Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every now and then on a small topic that pops into my head. This one helps keep my backlog lean.

Do it now!

It is so easy to let a backlog of documents to be processed pile up. If you’re researching online and you download a document, it’s very tempting to move on to the next document to download, rather than processing the one you just found. (I process documents by extracting the facts from a document, entering them into my database on Reunion and creating a source citation that is used for each fact.) Way too often, I just download willy nilly without processing and the result is a backlog of documents to be processed that sometimes weigh me down. If we don’t extract the data from the documents we find, they’re not benefiting us.

So here’s my advice, when you’re doing online research, I encourage you to build time into your research session to process the documents that you find in that session. Either do it right after downloading or process all documents found in that session at the end of the session. This way, you’ll keep your backlog to a minimum and potentially valuable documents won’t languish in your backlog.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

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!

Follow-up notebooks to the rescue!

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I’ve been using follow-up notebooks in Evernote for years to keep track of clues that I come across so that I don’t get distracted from my current research question. I have follow-up notebooks by Surname in my Evernote Genealogy stack. I also have a notebooks called Library Look Ups, where I paste links to FamilySearch documents that must be accessed from the Family History Library or one of its affiliates.

Two days ago, I met up with my genealogy buddy, Vickie, at the St. Louis County Library Headquarters’ Genealogy and History Library. The headquarters is closing tomorrow for more than year for renovation. While some of the genealogy collection is moving to another branch starting July 5, the resources won’t be as abundant.

Vickie and I thought it would be a good idea to pay one last visit while we could. We scheduled it a few weeks ago, before my trip to Walla Walla. Because of family and work obligations, I just haven’t had time to do genealogy research or even prepare as I normally would for this library trip.

So I just showed up with my computer at the library, with no plan or research question. But, thanks to my follow-up and library look-up notebooks in Evernote, I actually had a productive time! I first looked up everything in the library look-up notebook and then turned my attention to the follow-up notebooks by surname. That kept me busy the whole time I was there. And it got me away from the “what should I work on?” question that sometimes bedevils me.

I heartily recommend having a spot to record look-ups and follow-ups so you easily start researching when the opportunity arises.

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.