Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick Tip #13: Create follow-up notebooks to stay focused

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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 one has saved me from going down a rabbit hole many times.

Create follow-up notebooks to stay focused

I love playing detective, which is probably why I love genealogy research. So when I’m looking for information online it’s really hard to resist exploring every clue or idea that comes my way in the course of a research session. But if I do follow every lead, I often end up far away from where I intended to go.

That’s where follow-up notebooks come in. I have created follow-up notebooks by surname in Evernote. (This could certainly be accomplished in other platforms, in a tab in a spreadsheet, or on paper.) When I come across a clue or resource that has no bearing on the research question at hand, I just make a new note in the appropriate follow-up notebook. Later, when I’m researching that surname, the note is waiting for me. I don’t have to worry about forgetting it!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Quick Tip #12: Don’t enter a fact without creating a source citation

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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. I think this tip is an especially important one.

Don’t enter a fact without creating a source citation

When I first caught the genealogy bug at the turn of this century, I wrote down facts willy nilly without bothering to note where the fact came from. My “research” progressed quickly, but I ended up with an unreliable mess. I abandoned researching for a number of years and when I came back to in 2011 I vowed never to enter a fact into my database without creating a source citation and assigning that source to the fact.

That policy has served me well and is part of my digital workflow. Having a source for every single fact in my Reunion database means that when conflicting information come up, I can easily evaluate the sources and make a determination on what is more likely to be true. It gives me confidence in my research. And it makes my research more credible (and valuable) to others.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

A small enhancement to my genealogy map

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A small enhancement to my ancestor mapAs I’ve blogged here before, I have an ancestor map hanging on the wall with pins in it for the birth and death/burial places for my direct-line ancestors, up to my third great grandparents. I enjoy looking at it and I love how it makes migration more visible.

I initially started with a map that I pinned over a bulletin board I already had. But that board was bowed. So I put the map onto a thin sheet of cork on top of a piece of foam core, and placed the whole little parfait into a DIY frame. But over time the edges of the map kept pulling out of the frame, so I ended up buying an identical framed map and repinning everything. (So my advice to you if you’re interested in starting a similar project is to cut straight to the pre-framed map.)

The other day I made one tiny enhancement that I wanted to share. The map came with short pushpins with colored heads. On the map, I use longer pins, also with colored heads, so that I can add flags to them indicating the person the pin represents. I took the short pushpins and put them in the areas that I have personally visited for my genealogy research. Primarily that’s cemeteries, though I have spent some time at repositories in Kentucky. Click on the link above to see a larger version of the photos where those shorter pins are more visible.

I was pleased to see that I was able to add four pushpins representing visits to Kentucky, Nebraska, Alabama and western Missouri. I’ve visited graves of ancestors in all four of my lines (Adams, Brown, Rasco and Jeffries). I hadn’t really realized that before this exercise and that makes me feel happy.

The next time I travel to a new place for research, I’ll be delighted to add a pin to the map!

New Orderly Roots Guide on the way: How I Do It

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I’m putting the finishing touches on a new Orderly Roots guide! It’s called How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow and it explains, in some detail, how I go about organizing my own genealogy research. I’m never one to tell someone that there’s one right way to organize anything. But I have been honing an organizing process for a few years that works really well for me.

Instead of writing a guide suggesting all the various ways you might organize your research, I decided to write one detailing how I organize mine, in the hopes that it will be a jumping-off point for you.

I’m excited that it’s almost completed and I hope to publish it by the end of the year. Right now it’s over 30 pages long and it might get a little longer. Please keep an eye out for the announcement that it is available!

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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.