Organizing Archives - Page 13 of 68 Organize Your Family History

A small enhancement to my genealogy map

December 11, 2020 By Janine Adams 14 Comments

As 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!

Check out Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box

November 13, 2020 By Janine Adams 2 Comments

Back in April, I wrote an enthusiastic blog post about my favorite RootsTech 2020 presentation, Do Something with That Box from Stacy Julian. She kindly gave me permission to reprint her helpful handout because she hadn’t written about it on her own website.

I was delighted to see that last month she published a robust blog post on the topic that fleshes out what I wrote about. It’s called How to BEGIN with the Box and I urge you to check it out, even if you’ve read my post. It provides great detail and it includes the downloadable pdf of the handout, along with photos and explanations.

When I drove to Walla Walla in September, I took the opportunity to bring home a box of family stuff. It’s not so much documents as photos, but I intend to use Stacy’s framework as I go through it. (The box been sitting unopened for almost six weeks now…I think our stay-at-home holiday time will be a good time to address it.)

If you have a box of family memorabilia to go through, do yourself a favor and check out her terrific post. You can thank me (well, really, Stacy) later.

Quick Tip #10: Start with a research question

November 10, 2020 By Janine Adams Leave a Comment

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. My research always goes better when follow the advice in this tip!

Start your research session with a question

It can be fun to click around on Ancestry and Family Search and just see what you can find. But if instead you start your session with a research question in mind, your precious research time will be better spent. Knowing what you’re looking for helps you stay focused and resist temptation. If you come across tempting information that doesn’t pertain to your research question, you can make note of it in your research log (or somewhere else) so you can come back to it at a later session.

Having a research question for each session is bound to make your sessions more productive and move your research along more quickly.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Quick Tip #9: Use a timer!

October 27, 2020 By Janine Adams 4 Comments

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 I use literally every day, in many aspects of my life.

Use a timer to stay focused

It’s so easy to fall down a rabbit hole when you’re researching and the next thing you know hours have passed and it’s past your bedtime (or you’ve missed a meal). Sometimes the likelihood of a long session is enough to stop you from starting a research session altogether.

Setting a timer can really help. It has two benefits: It reminds you to stop when the timer goes off. And knowing the timer will be going off soon is often enough to keep you from falling down that rabbit hole in the first place. When you’re tempted to stray, you can make a note to follow up on later and get back to to your research focus.

I almost always set a timer before a genealogy research session because I usually can’t afford to spend hours on a research session, no matter how enjoyable it is (or badly I want to solve a problem). I use the timer on my iPhone or Apple Watch, but you can ask Google (or Alexa) to set a timer you or use an old-fashioned kitchen timer.