Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick Tip #18: Let go of “should”

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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 couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This is one that I tell my clients (and myself) over and over.

Let go of the word “should”

Should is one of my least favorite words. My advice: Don’t let anyone tell you how you should organize your research, how far you should go out on your tree, or whether your Ancestry tree should be public or private. You do you.

That said, there are a few actual shoulds in genealogy. You should cite your sources. You should evaluate everything critically. You should do your own research, rather than just copying someone’s tree. You should be polite to your fellow genealogists.

But so much is optional in this wonderful hobby. I encourage you to follow your own sense of the way you want to do things. Particularly when it comes to organizing your research, the only should, in my opinion, is that you should use a system that works for you.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Why do you want to organize your research?

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As a professional organizer (and podcaster who pays a lot of attention to perfectionism) I know that getting in touch with why you want to get organized is invaluable. Instead of thinking, “I should get organized,” which isn’t very motivating, you can take a moment to reflect on why getting organized is important to you. When you do that, you can more easily take action. And you can get past perfectionism and know when something is good enough.

This is true of organizing your home, and it’s also true of organizing your genealogy research. Why do you want to get organized? Here are some possible reasons:

  • To fully benefit from the information contained in the documents you find
  • To trust your research
  • To have facts at your fingertips to share with others
  • To have your research in a format that you can easily share
  • To feel less overwhelmed and more in control of your research
  • To pass along your legacy to your descendants

Knowing why it’s important to you to make the effort to organize your research can help you select a system that will work for you and help you let go of the notion that your system has to be perfect. Trust me, it doesn’t. It just needs to serve your “why.”

I’d love to hear about why you want to organize your research. Just leave a comment. For me, it’s all about benefiting from my work and trusting my research.

If you sign up for my free Mailing List, you’ll receive a series of emails from me that touch on these issues. If you’re not yet on the Mailing List, I encourage you to sign up!

How They Do It: Amie Bowser Tennant

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I am delighted to present a new interview in my How They Do It Series. I bet a number of you are familiar with Amie Bowser Tennant, The Genealogy Reporter, who brings us genealogy news, education and inspiration. Amie is a research genealogist and national speaker and, in addition to keeping her own blog, she is a blogger for FamilySearch. I’ve enjoyed hearing her speak at conferences and am so happy when she agreed to do this interview. Enjoy!

How They Do It: Amie Bowser Tennant

How long have you been doing genealogy?

I have been doing genealogy for 22 years. It started out as a passion to scrapbook, but when I realized how many pictures my parents had of people they didn’t know, I started investigating the family. That is how I got hooked!

What’s your favorite thing about being a genealogist?

Wow…my favorite thing about genealogy? There are so many! I guess when I find a document that no one else had been able to find.

What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to organizing your genealogy?

My biggest challenge to organizing my genealogy is getting ahead of myself. In other words, working on too many projects at once and not organizing as I go. I have everything I need print out documents, label them with a citation, file them in a folder or binder, and save them on the computer and on the cloud, and I still get excited and forget to print something or cite something from time to time!

What is your favorite technology tool for genealogy?

My favorite tech tool for genealogy is my smartphone with a camera! I don’t have to make Xerox copies anymore and it has made a world of difference to the quality of the images I can get while visiting a research center on site.

If you were starting out new as a genealogist what would you do differently?

If I were starting out as a new genealogist, I wouldn’t necessarily do anything different than what I did. The best thing I did was to take the National Genealogical Society American genealogy at-home course. It set a great foundation.

Do you keep a research log? If so, what format?

Yes, I keep a research log in Microsoft Excel usually. Across the top, I have the research question in bold. Then, each column gets a heading: Item Viewed, Date Viewed, What was looked for, What was found, URL link, Source Citation. I save this on Google Drive so I have it accessible anywhere I am doing research.

How do you keep track of clues or ideas for further research?

Lots of highlighters on document copies and my notebooks and I use colored sticky tabs to mark things in books or notebooks that I need to come back to.

How do you go about sharing your personal research with cousins or other interested parties?

I rarely share my personal research with other genealogy minded people. Not because I don’t want to, but because my family members aren’t interested in getting a traditional report. For this reason, I have done lots of unique things. I made a giant poster with all the descendants of my grandparents; I created a scrapbook of fun stories of just the grandmothers in the family; and I wrote a narrative about one side of our family after having done several interviews of family members. On occasion, I do a special something for the kids that has to do with their ancestor…like an ancestor birthday party or a potted plant of a flower/vegetable one of their ancestors used to grow in their garden.

What’s the most important thing you do to prepare for a research trip?

The most important thing I do before a research trip is make sure my car is in good running condition. I once got a flat tire on a research trip and that was not fun! I also make sure I have a way to charge all my devices (phone, laptop, gps, etc.)

What’s your biggest piece of advice to genealogists in terms of organizing their research?

My biggest piece of advice for genealogists is to remember to not only cite their record sources, but to remember to source their pictures. I always add metadata or text on the front of a digitized photo with a source citation of where it came from.

Do you have a dedicated space in your home for doing genealogy research? What’s it like?

I have a genealogy office that I feel very fortunate to have the room for! I have a nice big desk, shelving, and it is entirely decorated with pictures of family ancestors and my collection of oil cans. It has a big window that I can see out while sitting at the desk so I can enjoy looking over the fields as I work.

Raise your hand if you can relate to getting ahead of yourself and not organizing as you go! It’s nice to know that this also happens to the pros we admire! I love Amie’s ideas for sharing genealogy research. And I think I will now always give my car a check up before leaving for a research trip. Thank you so much, Amie, for sharing how you do it and for sharing the photos of your delightful genealogy space!

Trying to stay laser focused this month

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Sample from my genealogy follow up notebookIt’s less than a week in, but I’m really enjoying this month’s 30 x 30 challenge. My goal is to get through as much of my backlog as I can. On April 1, I had 112 files in my backlog waiting to be processed, but many of them are newspaper articles, which come in pairs (a jpg with the whole page and a pdf of the clip). At minimum, therefore, I have 56 source documents to process. In reality, it’s more than that.

I’ve tried this in the past and failed. I would end up allowing myself to do further research if questions came up during the backlog busting. That would slow down the elimination of the backlog, for obvious reasons. But this month, I’m trying very hard not to do any research; I have a laser focus on processing files. (By that, I mean I’m analyzing each document, creating a source citation and attaching it to all the facts I glean from a document.)

I created a note in my Evernote research log called, “Follow ups from April 30 x 30 backlog busting.” And when I come across further research I need to do, I note it there. That’s a picture of it above. Like the rest of my research log, my follow-up notes are very casual.

My intention is to turn my focus to this follow-up note when this month’s 30 x 30 is over. I’ve set a reminder in Evernote to look at that note on May 1. (I felt like a genius when I thought of the reminder!)

In six days, I’ve processed 25 documents. If I can keep this pace up I should be able to get rid of my backlog by the end of the month. I’m feeling really productive and I’m really enjoying myself. I think the key, right now, is my determination to not add new documents. Of course, if I don’t succeed, I’ll cut myself a ton of slack because I know that any progress I make is good.

I hope your 30 x 30 is going just as well!

Join the mailing list!

When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.