Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Should you hang on to paper documents after scanning them?

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Very little paper comes into my genealogy life since do almost all my research online. But in 2022 I cleaned out my parents’ home (they have both passed away) as well as my aunt’s (she’s in a nursing home) so I have some paper to think about. I wrote about this last year and in reviewing that post, I thought it valuable enough to run again. My feelings on the matter have not changed in the intervening year and a half!

I do most of my research online, so this hasn’t come up a lot. But this week I’m going through documents that had lived in my parents’ home and my aunt’s home and some of them are original vital records. I did my first group of ten a couple of days ago and scanned and processed them. And then I had to decide what to do with the originals.

This morning I went through the little stack one by one and followed my gut about those I wanted to file into the paper files I have left over from before I processed everything digitally and those I would feel comfortable discarding.

In truth, I could discard any of them, since I’ve captured the images. But my gut tells me to hang on to those documents that have original writing or signatures. An example is my parents’ marriage certificate, shown above. They were married by father’s uncle and I think he filled out the form. I don’t have a good, logical reason for this decision. It just feels right because these documents feel special. I have the space in my file cart and the files are already created, so it will be a simple matter to file them. If I have to create a new file folder label and put it on a folder to file something, I might feel like more trouble than it’s worth.

This is a matter of personal preference and I understand that my preferences might change. (And you may have a completely different preference.) If I end up with a lot more and it feels too laborious, I may revisit this criterion!

My gift of gratitude: 25% discount on Orderly Roots

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Today is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and on my long list of things to be grateful for is you, my Organize Your Family History community. I’ve been writing this blog for a dozen years and I am so grateful for its wonderful readers.

As an expression of gratitude, I’m offering 25% off my Orderly Roots Bundle. It’s normally $39.99 but if you use the promo code THANKS, you’ll get $10 off until Sunday, November 26, 2023 at midnight central time.

If you subscribe to my mailing list, you should have received an email at noon central with this offer.

Thank you for reading, commenting, and supporting Organize Your Family History! I hope you have a wonderful time with your family history research this weekend!

We can create history for our descendants this Thanksgiving

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For those of us in the U.S.,  it’s Thanksgiving week. I originally wrote this Thanksgiving post in 2016, and I like repeating it every year. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! I am grateful for you!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.) Or we can do what Stacy Julian does and ask our relatives to fill out a simple form.

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Is Ancestry accurate?

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I wrote this post four years ago and felt it was worth sharing again. You might be interested to read the comments on the original post because, as usual, readers added valuable information and perspective.

ancestry.com logoWhen I was at the Kentucky Historical Society research room in June, I overheard a conversation between a librarian and a patron. The patron, who displayed a certain amount of naiveté about genealogy research when he asked the librarian whether there was an index to everything in the library, proudly told the librarian that he’d been researching on Ancestry.com for years. The librarian’s response made me raise my eyebrows. He said, with a disapproving tone of voice, “A lot of stuff is wrong there; you can’t really trust those online sites.” I was so surprised by that statement that I wrote it down.

This felt all kinds of wrong to me for a couple of reasons. One is that, in one sentence, he invalidated this man’s genealogy experience. The other is that it’s just not true. I probably should have spoken up and argued the point, but I was in a library…it didn’t feel the place for a debate.

But it got me thinking about the notion that online sites like Ancestry or Family Search are inaccurate. I think that the librarian was referring to the family trees that can be found on the sites. Sure, trees are only as good as the practices of the genealogist who created them (or, in the case of Family Search, added to them). Many are not accurate. That’s why I ignore them.

Ancestry is typically the first place I go for source documents when I’m doing online research. It has millions of documents that provide evidence to prove facts in my genealogy research. I usually find them via search, either on a person or in the card catalog. I almost never even look at hints. And I carefully evaluate the suggested records that come up when I’ve clicked on a document in a search. (Usually, they are for the person I’m researching and are hugely helpful.)

Ancestry, along with Family Search, are fundamental to growing my research when I’m researching online (and I’m usually researching online). I was shocked to hear this authority figure completely dismiss online sites.

I was recently talking with a genealogy friend about her quest to solve a mystery. It became apparent that she was using online trees (in combination with DNA matches) as a main avenue for trying to solve the mystery. The conflicts among the trees were frustrating her. I suggested she back away from the trees and look for documents that could prove her suppositions. For me, the documents in Ancestry, not the trees, are where the value lies.

Of course, we must evaluate the documents and the evidence found in them. Good genealogists question everything. Is there inaccurate information on Ancestry? Of course–the family trees are full of them. Do the hints or suggested records sometimes apply to the wrong person? Yes!

But to describe Ancestry as inaccurate is, well, inaccurate. Everything you find in any repository (online or otherwise) must be evaluated. If you use Ancestry as tool to find documents that you then analyze, you’re on the path to success, in my opinion. However, if your starting point at Ancestry is looking at family trees, you may find yourself in the weeds.

My annual subscription to Ancestry is up for renewal this month. I always give it some thought and I always renew. I’m fortunate to be able to afford it; if I were looking to economize, though, Ancestry would probably be the last subscription I’d drop.

What about you? Do you think that the online sites get a bad rap? How do you make sure you’re getting good information from them?