Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

How I store my electronic files

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Computer monitor connected to laptop with one cord and wireless keyboard and mouseI first published this post in 2016 and it seemed to be helpful, so I thought I’d run it again. I’ve updated it a little to represent current practices, but very little has changed about my process in the last seven years!

I love organizing my family history research electronically. As I’ve mentioned here many times, I try not to print digital documents and instead store everything electronically where I can have easy access to it.

I don’t think I have been clear when I talk about storing my genealogy data electronically that I’m not talking about storing it as a family tree on Ancestry or Family Search. I’m talking about storing it on my hard drive.

To me, it would be folly to rely on an outside service to store my precious genealogy data. If the only copy of my information was at Ancestry, I would be required to renew my subscription to access my own data. Even storing all my information at a free site like Family Search feels risky to me. In addition to the fact that at Family Search there’s a single tree that anyone can change, it’s conceivable that they could change their terms of service to something unacceptable to me. Or start charging for access. Or simply vanish. Another place that some people store their genealogy documents is Evernote. I think that can be a great way to have easy, searchable access to information. But I wouldn’t store genealogy documents on Evernote that I don’t also have on my hard drive. They could go belly up. (It happened with Springpad.)

I enter all of my data into family-tree software that resides on my laptop’s hard drive. I use Reunion 13, a Mac program. It can sync with the iPhone and iPad using the ReunionTouch app. I like that storing my data on my computer, rather than an online service, is that the information is accessible even when I don’t have an internet connection (if I have my computer with me).

Of course, I back up my hard drive, both on an external hard drive via Time Machine and with an online backup service (Backblaze). Backing up is critical.

I’m not saying that my way is the right way or the best way. But I’ll share with you my process for storing info, in case you find it helpful or interesting. So far, it’s working well for me.

When I find a sourced piece of information pertinent to my research this is what I do:

  1. Add the information to the appropriate person(s) in Reunion (or add a person if need be).
  2. Cite the source in Reunion.
  3. Download the information (or scan it if I found it in paper form).
  4. Attach an image of the source document to the source citation in Reunion.
  5. File the digital document in that ancestor’s electronic folder on my hard drive, copying it if it applies to more than one ancestor.
  6. Scour the source for further information.
  7. Make a note in Evernote if it sparks potential further research.

So far this feels good to me and I haven’t second guessed it.

How do you store your family tree information?

If you’d like a deep dive on how I organize my genealogy research, check out my Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizers Genealogy Workflow.

How They Do It: J. Mark Lowe

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I’m so happy to publish another interview in my popular How They Do It series! This time, it’s with J. Mark Lowe, FUGA, a professional genealogist, author, and lecturer who specializes in original records and manuscripts throughout the southern U.S. A course coordinator for southern research for multiple genealogy institutes, Mark is a past president of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) and past president of the southern Kentucky Genealogical Society. I had the pleasure of working with him when we both presented at the Henderson County (Kentucky) Public Library seminar last year. I can tell you first hand that he is an organized individual. And he’s a delight to work with!

How They Do It: J. Mark Lowe

How long have you been doing genealogy research?

I became interested in family and connections when I was seven years old after my Grandmother passed. (Dad’s Mom) My Dad had some of the answers, but he connected me with his Aunts (my Grandmother’s Sisters) who started filling in some spots. One of those Aunts was the Secretary for the local Congressman and her office was across the street from the County Courthouse. She arranged for my Dad to bring me to visit, along with clothing. When he dropped me off, she took me to the County Court Clerk’s office in the Courthouse. Mr. Oval Motley, the Clerk, introduced me to original records, and encouraged me to create transcriptions from the originals. (Plain Paper copies were not yet available.)

That opened the door to a continuous flow of curiosity.

What’s your favorite thing about being a genealogist?

Learning the stories of my ancestors and the often untold/unheard stories of others.

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

Widely diverse records with a mixture of Archival documents, copies, and digital records. Making them all accessible for different reasons.

What is your favorite technology tool for genealogy?

My cell phone, using the Ancestry app and Newspapers.com. I can answer my own question or a query on the fly about family or history.

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

Focus on each person’s story more – I would not rush to collect the tree. This is especially when you have opportunity and time to learn about “near” living relatives before they or witnesses are gone.

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

I use 4×6 index cards, Google Keep & Google Tasks, and ToDos in my genealogical software.

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

I maintain a private tree on Ancestry that I share with folks who have an interest. I also maintain a Family website primarily for cousins.

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

I take some time to mull & ponder the project, define the purpose of the trips, and determine the tasks to be completed with a timetable.

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

Locations are more important to research that just the single families. You are likely to have multiple family members in each location. Being able to look at the location independent of each family will save you time, money, and headaches.

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

Everywhere! I have a library/office, but often do research on my front porch, in my living room chair or occasionally while lying in bed. Good wifi!

Do you have anything to add?

The best researchers are persistent. They don’s stop when the record they seek is not where they look. They back up, rethink the options, learn about the record creation, and go find the record.

So many wonderful nuggets in Mark’s concise responses! I think his advice to organize information around location as well as family is really interesting. It’s something I don’t do currently but will explore. I also love Mark’s wise words on taking the time to learn from your close relatives while they are still living and able to share family history information. Thank you so much, Mark, for sharing your wisdom and expertise! If you’d like to learn more about Mark, check out Kentucky Tennessee Research Associates. You can also find him on YouTube channel and Twitter.

Making military research a little easier

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Before Memorial Day in 2016, I wrote this post on figuring out which ancestors might have fought in which war. I’ve run it a couple more times and it seemed like a good time to run it again. Incidentally, MyHeritage is offering free access to its 83 million military records this weekend, May 25-30, 2023.

Whenever I read about a records collection for a certain conflict (which seems to happen around military-related holidays, like Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day or anniversaries of conflicts) I get excited about researching my ancestors in those collections, which can be such a treasure trove of information. But in the past sometimes I would have difficulty remembering which ancestor might have fought in which war and I’d become overwhelmed and abandon the effort.

So I created a document that shows me the prospective ancestors for each conflict, based on the dates they were born. At the time, I used a table from Family Tree Magazine but when I went looking for it to share in this post, I couldn’t find it. However, I did find an even-better table called Ages of Servicemen in Wars that lists 20 military conflicts, the years they were fought, the typical birth dates for soldiers and the  typical ages of soldiers. Thank you, FamilySearch!

Armed with that information, I created a simple spreadsheet (pictured, in part, above) with the following column headers:

  • Conflict
  • Likely Birth Year of Soldiers
  • Prospective Ancestor
  • Confirmed Ancestor

For each conflict, I entered the names of the ancestors who were born during the birth-year window listed in column 2. After I ascertained that one had indeed fought in that war, I entered an X in the Confirmed Ancestor column. What I should have done and will from here forward, is place a dash or an N in the Confirmed Ancestor column to indicate that I’d ruled that ancestor out.

This is a simple way to see at a glance who I might research when I’m looking at military collections at the National Archives, Fold3 or elsewhere. It’s easy to create and I think it’s well worth the time spent.

 

My process for downloaded documents

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Life’s a little nuts right now, so rather than creating a new post, I’m re-running this post from October 20, 2017 in which I describe my workflow for a document I downloaded from the internet. Almost six years later, the process hasn’t really changed! For more detailed information on how I process digital documents, check out How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow, a 37-page downloadable pdf available for $19.99.

Last March, I wrote a post called My digital workflow that detailed what I do with a document I find on the Internet. (I never print it.) My digital workflow has not changed since then and it’s working out really well for me.

Last weekend, I did a talk at the St. Louis Genealogy Conference about going paperless and in my Powerpoint I included screenshots of the digital workflow and also a summary slide. The attendees asked for copies of the summary slide, so I decided to post it here.

The process is basically the same as my March post but I switched up the steps a little.

The example I used in my talk was my father’s uncle, Jay Ellis Adams (1914-2004). I had found his obituary online at the newspaper’s website. Here’s the workflow:

1. I click Print and, in the printer dialog box, Open in Preview (my Mac’s default pdf reader), which downloads the document to my computer. (If it had been a document at Ancestry, I would have clicked Save, then Save to My Computer.)

2. I immediately rename the file, using my file-naming protocol, which is Date Type of Document-Ancestor Name-Locality. I stick it into my Surnames folder, as a temporary holding place until I file it in step 6. I know that any unfiled documents in the Surnames folder require processing.

 

3. I select a fact from the document, add it to Reunion and create a source citation for it.

 

4. In Reunion, I click the Preview tab in the source record and then click Copy Source. (For the eagle-eyes among you, I originally found a transcript at Genealogy Bank and used that as the source citation. Then I decided to go to the newspaper’s website and download it from there, so I changed the source citation. But I was too lazy to take a new screenshot.)

5. I paste the source citation into the metadata of the source document (the obituary) by Ctrl-clicking on the file and selecting Get Info from the menu that appears, then pasting into the Comments area.

 

6. Then I file the document into my folder structure. My folder structure for collateral relatives is Genealogy/Surnames/Collateral/[Surname]/[Name of Ancestor (YOB-YOD)]. If the document  applies to multiple people, I duplicate it for each person and then drag it into the appropriate folder for each person. But I don’t take the trouble to rename it.

7. The final step is to drag the document into the Multimedia area of the source record in Reunion. This creates a link to the document so that I can open it up inside Reunion, which is very handy.

 

From there, I continue to extract information from the source document and add that it to Reunion. Every piece of information I glean from a single source document uses the same source number, no matter what person it applies to.

Here’s the summary slide:

This is the way I do and it works well for me. Of course, it’s not the only way to do it or perhaps the best way to do it. But I’m hoping you’ll find it useful to see my workflow. I’ve been processing documents this way for almost a year now and it’s working very well.

Again, for more in-depth information on how I organize my own genealogy, check out How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow, a 37-page downloadable pdf available for $19.99.

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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.