Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick Tip #5: Start your digital file name with a year

By 11 Comments

Here’s the next in my 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) high-impact post every couple of weeks. This one has worked well for me and is worth consideration.

Start your file name for your digital documents with the year of the document

As I mentioned in my first Quick Tip, I start my file names with the year of the document (click on the link to see the rest of the file-naming protocol). I’ve been doing this from the beginning–I’m sure at someone else’s advice. It has proven to be so beneficial. Here’s why:

  • It puts my files in chronological order when I sort alphabetically. I have folders for each person I’m researching and having the files arranged chronologically makes it very easy to find a particular document.
  • It makes it easy to see what’s missing. For example, missing censuses jump out.
  • It creates a little bit of a timeline for a particular ancestor

I’ve never been tempted to stray from this practice and I frequently think about how much I appreciate it. Like everything else, this is something that works for me and may not necessarily work for the way you think. But when I feel passionate about something–particularly if it has to do with organizing–I like to share!

Handwriting: One of the challenges of census research

By 3 Comments

Censuses are such a great friend to genealogists. They’ve been digitized and indexed. From 1850 forward they supply household members’ names. And every ten years you get a new batch to work with.

There are lots of reasons to take what’s mentioned in a census with a grain of salt, like the competence of the enumerator or the knowledge of the informant.

But one of the big challenges with census research is handwriting. It’s not just that handwriting has changed through time, so older writing looks unfamiliar.  Often the enumerator seems to have lousy handwriting. (Isn’t it wonderful when you come across a census whose enumerator had perfect penmanship?)  He/she was probably tired after a hard day of knocking on doors. So it’s important to remember when dealing with censuses that a name may not be what it looks like.

This week I’ve been doing tiny projects for my organizing blog and today when I was cleaning out my under-the-desk file cart, I came across a piece a paper I’d created some years ago with census entries for one of my collateral relatives, Henrietta Adams Timmons, daughter of George Washington Adams (1845-1938), whom I write about a lot here. She was living with her father, George, stepmother Della and son, Louis Quincy, in the 1910 census. In the 1920 census was living with her husband, Magellan Timmons, and children Louis, Clayetta and George.

Check out these images from the 1910 and 1920 censuses, respectively. I wrote the names of the people next to the census image.

You can see that Louis’ name is practically indecipherable (and he appears to be called Quincy in 1920, though that’s hardly legible); Magellan has become Michael and Clayetta looks like Sylelta (maybe)? It’s no surprise that Della was indexed Lellar.

The worst part about the bad handwriting of the 1910 census is that the enumerator was George Washington Adams himself!

Of course poor handwriting makes indexing really difficult. Sometimes that means you have to browse, rather than search for your people. I guess my takeaway is that I come across conflicting or confusing names for someone in my family tree, I need to consider whether handwriting might be the culprit.

Quick Tip #4: Grab a URL when you download a document

By 10 Comments

Here’s the next in my 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) high-impact post every couple of weeks. This one has saved me a lot of time in the past when I’ve let unprocessed files pile up.

Grab a URL when you download a document

When I’m researching mindfully, I process a document as soon as I download it, before I move on to anything else. (And by that I mean create a sort citation, glean all the information from the document and add it to my genealogy software.) But as I revealed in a recent post about my backlog, sometimes the reality is that downloaded documents languish before being processed. (I do always change the filename as soon as I download, though.)

One thing I’ve trained myself to do if I realize I’m not going to have a chance to process a document on the spot is to copy the URL of the document and paste it into the metadata of the file so that I can easily see the document online again. Often I want to look at the context of the document, so I want to look at the website, not just the image I downloaded.

To accomplish this on my MacBook, I copy the URL from the website first. Then, after I’ve renamed the file, I right (or control) click on the filename and select Get Info. (Or, as a reader pointed out to me, I can just click on the filename and press Command+I!) That pulls up the information pane. I simply paste the URL into the Comments section. When I finally get around to processing it, it’s very easy to copy and paste the URL into my browser to see it again.

I think, but I’m not positive, that the same thing is accomplished in Windows by right-clicking on a file, selecting Properties and then clicking on the Details tab. If I’m wrong about that, please correct me in the comments!

Is any detail too trivial to record?

By 12 Comments

I’ve been working on processing my backlog of newspaper articles that I downloaded during my burst of newspaper research in June and July. I don’t know about you, but when I’m doing newspaper research (or, really, any genealogy research), it can be tempting not to go to the trouble of downloading everything I find because it doesn’t seem important enough. And when I’m in the midst of a research session sometimes the downloading (or printing or copying, if I’m actually looking at paper documents) can seem so tedious that I only bother with the big stuff.

Come to think about it, that’s one advantage of short, frequent research sessions that I should add to my post The value of daily research. Since I don’t get bleary-eyed or weary during short sessions, I’m more likely to make the effort to download everything.

In any case, this week, as I was processing some newspaper articles, I was so happy that I had taken the effort to download even the tiniest articles. For example, there was an article in The Clinton Eye of Clinton, Henry, Missouri about my grandmother, Susie Jeffries Brown (1907-1999), having her tonsils and adenoids out on August 26, 1919. I didn’t think much of it when I downloaded it, but as I processed it, I noticed that the surgery took place 50 miles from her home in Rockville, Bates, Missouri and that it happened two days after her twelfth birthday.

I paused to think about whether 12-year-old Susie might have spent her birthday full of trepidation about the surgery and I wondered how long she stayed in the hospital. Was she served ice cream? (That always seemed to be the best part of getting your tonsils out when I was a kid.) It prompted me to do a little more research and I learned that by 1919 tonsillectomies were growing more prevalent (in fact hers was one of three mentioned in the newspaper article!), though they exploded in popularity in the 1920s. (If you’re as big a nerd as me and feel like digging into the topic, you can read The Rise and Decline of Tonsillectomies from The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (vol. 62, No. 4, October 2007) at JSTOR.)

I was lucky enough to have known my grandmother, who died in her 90s when I was in my 30s. But I almost always think of her as a senior citizen. Sometimes I think of her as a  mother of young children, as I recall stories my mother told me about her childhood. But I don’t know much about my grandmother’s childhood, mostly because I was lousy listener as a kid and young adult.

So this little newspaper article added to my understanding of my grandmother’s childhood and, perhaps more importantly, gave me reason to think about her as a child.

Whenever I’m tempted to skip downloading something, I’m going to remember that trivial things can often provide great clues when taken together with other clues found over time. That makes them important to capture. But even when they’re truly trivial, they can provide valuable little insights.