Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

What Orderly Roots guides should I write next?

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10 things I wish I'd known when I started doing genealogyThis week, I debuted my first two Orderly Roots guides, 10 Secrets to Organizing Your Genealogy Research and 10 Things I Wish I’d Know When I Started Doing Genealogy. I have come up with eight more topics, but I haven’t written them yet.

I’d love to have your input to help me decide in what order to write and publish them. So I created a little poll.

Please check the topics that interest you. (You’re not making a commitment to buy one!) You can check up to three boxes. If you’d like to see an Orderly Roots guide on a topic not in the list, feel free to enter that topic in the Other box.

Thank you!

Announcing new Orderly Roots guides!

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10 secrets to organizing your genealogy researchI’m very excited to announce the launch of a new series of downloadable pdfs that I’m offering for sale here on Organize Your Family History.  I’m calling the series Orderly Roots, and the first is now available for purchase.

The Orderly Roots guides give me a way to go a little more in-depth on genealogy organizing topics than I can on the blog. 10 Secrets to Organizing Your Genealogy Research, the first of a planned series of 10 such guides,  is available now!

Each guide is delivered as a downloadable pdf with ten pages of text. They sell for $8.99 each. Here’s the list of topics I’m planning so far:

I’d love your input on topics. Do any of these particularly float your boat? Are there any topics not on the list that you’d like to see me explore in an Orderly Roots Guide?

10 Secrets to Organizing Your Genealogy Research is hot off the (figurative) presses and I plan to make 10 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Doing Genealogy available this week. [Update: I just made it available for purchase!] The rest, I hope, will be completed by year’s end.

I’d love your input on topics and may create a poll to post on the blog. In the meantime, feel free to give me feedback in the comments!

Professional organizers talk family history

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As a professional organizer who blogs (in addition writing here, I have a blog at my business’s Peace of Mind Organizing website), I occasionally  participate in the monthly Professional Organizers Blog Carnival. Each month organizing bloggers are asked to submit a single post that matches that month’s theme.

I was delighted to see that the theme for October is Family History. My biggest challenge was to decide which blog post to submit! I ended up submitting one from my organizing website, Tracing my roots: Why I love genealogy research.

The Blog Carnival was published today and it occurred to me that readers of Organize Your Family History might enjoy perusing the 14 family-history-related blog posts in the Carnival. My organizing colleagues write great stuff.

So here’s the link: Family History – Professional Organizers Blog Carnival.

Enjoy!

Create (or download) genealogy forms with Transpose

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I think many genealogists (including me) enjoy forms. We collect data and we like to have a place to put it. I have been playing with a website that allows me to create forms willy nilly and I’m having a great time.

That website is Transpose. It makes it ridiculously easy create forms that you can fill out yourself or share with others via weblink. (So you could create a form to send to cousins, for example, and the answers would form a database in your Transpose account.) You can also publish form templates for others to download and customize for their own use.

I learned about Transpose via Diahan Southard, Your DNA Guide, who mentioned that she used Transpose’s previous incarnation, KustomNote, for creating contact forms that help her organize the many DNA-related contacts she receives.

Since creating my (free) account on Transpose, I have created a bunch of forms, including several genealogy-related templates that I’ve been using regularly.

I’ve made three genealogy templates public:

  • Genealogy conference notes (which was really handy when I was taking notes at the Southern Illinois Genealogical Society’s conference)
  • Genealogy task list (which is wear I’m keeping track of current projects, as I blogged about last week)
  • Genealogy abstract form (which I’m using to capture data as I abstract my ancestors’ Civil War pension files)

Please feel free to download them and customize them for your use. I’m sure I’ll be adding more–they’ll all be tagged Genealogy, so they’ll be easy to find when you browse public templates at Transpose.  All my templates are quite simple, but I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of the power of Transpose. I look forward to getting into it deeper!

Oh, and of course, Transpose has an iOS app, so I can use it on my iPhone and iPad. (An Android app is in development.)

If you use Transpose and have any public templates, please let me know in the comments!

Unfortunately, Transpose announced on November 8, 2016 that it is shutting down on December 9, 2016.