Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

A fun way to link family history with the Olympics

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Ancestor Olympics!I was contacted by Ann Golightly Jeffs of the crafty blog Ivory Bloom about the free printables she’s created in honor of the Olympics. They’re Ancestor Cards, like baseball cards, that you can download and then add your ancestors’ names and birth/death dates and places and even their pictures. (You can do the adding either in software or by hand, after printing.) The idea is that you root in the Olympics for the countries your ancestors are from.

The blog post is full of advice on ways to incorporate family history into the Olympic celebrations (including making Olympic torches!). I think if you have kids or grandkids, it would be a great way to teach them an appreciation for their roots.

Included among the printables is a medal count chart, which would be a fun way to see ancestors competing against one another.

I think these are great ideas. I’m definitely in favor of anything that helps promote an appreciation of family history!

How far on the branches do you go?

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Five years ago, I blogged about my quandary over whether to research my collateral lines, rather than focusing on my direct-line ancestors. That I even hesitated to explore collateral lines amazes me because the benefits are now obvious. These collateral lines provide valuable clues. They help verify that the person I’m researching is my person. My family tree is very obviously not complete without them.

Two years ago, I blogged that was rededicating myself to the task of adding siblings; that is, I going back to the censuses or other information I’d downloaded previously and filling in the blanks.

Now I have a new quandary on the other side of the spectrum: Should I limit my research when it comes to the collateral lines? In 2017 and so far in 2018 I’ve focused my research on my Adams line, barely even looking at the other three lines. In doing so, I’ve been able to really explore the collateral lines without feeling any pressure to return to my direct-line ancestors. It’s been really rewarding and fun.

This has added a little complexity in terms of organizing, but nothing I can’t handle. A year ago, I simply had a Collateral subfolder in my Surnames folder with all the source documents I’d downloaded for collateral relatives mixed together–I didn’t have enough to merit subfolders. But when the number of documents started to grow, I created subfolders for the surnames and the individuals, like I do with my direct-line ancestors, except that they fall under the Collateral folder. So the path looks like this:

Genealogy/Surnames/Collateral/[Surname]/[Name of Ancestor (YOB-YOD)]/Document name

I just checked. I have 419 documents in the Collateral folder.

I’m going to the library this afternoon, where I can access certain documents on Family Search that I can’t access at home, because the library is affiliated with the Family History Library. As I was creating the list of look ups in Evernote I realized that they’re for ancestors that are a bit far afield:

  • A marriage document for my 2nd great grandfather’s stepdaughter
  • A marriage document for my great grandfather’s half-brother’s wife’s parents

So I’m wondering whether I should ratchet things back closer to my direct-line ancestors or just continue happily exploring the folks who cross my path.

I thought I’d turn to you and ask. Do you limit who you research, or do you research anyone who is somehow related to you?

Photo by Anders Sandberg via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Themes from 2017’s How They Do It series

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I spent an enjoyable hour or so going through all 12 of this year’s How They Do It interviews to see whether there were common themes that emerged among all the interviews. I wasn’t surprised to learn that there were!

Here are the 2017 participants (in chronological order), with links to their interviews:

There were a lot of commonalities among these successful genealogists. Most of them, for example, keep their data digitally, rather than on paper. Staying on top of paper was a bigger struggle than organizing digital files. Almost all wish they had crafted a source citation for all information when they first started out. (Don’t we all?) The thrill of the hunt, the problem solving, the discoveries and/or the connections were the favorite aspects of genealogy research with everyone.

The piece of advice that virtually everyone offered is no surprise. Cite your sources. Other themes that emerged include Keep a research log (and note unsuccessful searches as well as successful ones). Organize as you go — don’t let a backlog build up. Use an organizing system that works for you. And in order to avoid being overwhelmed, several of the interviewees suggested you focus on one line or one family at a time.

There was so much wisdom in these interviews that I don’t have space to quote them all. But here are some of my favorite quotes from the interviews:

My philosophy on organizing things right away is this: the more you put it off or delay it the more difficult it will be. That time spent reorganizing could be better spent researching for ancestors. Lack of organization basically squanders your precious time. (Thomas MacEntee)

I’ve learned that “getting organized” can become an all-consuming goal if we get stuck in the mindset of finding the “perfect” system or solution. I do better when I remind myself that progress is better than perfection; fix what isn’t working and move forward. (Denise Levenick)

The Internet is a bittersweet trap. You will never solve your tough genealogical problems by using only online sources. There is so much more out there that will never see the light of digitization. (Michael Lacopo)

I would encourage people not to make their systems too complicated. If another researcher or a family member ever has to go through your papers later and it isn’t clear how things are organized, that’s when research ends up getting tossed. Simple is good. (Amy Johnson Crow)

When we freely and openly share, family history becomes this truly collaborative environment that helps us make discoveries quicker and helps us be more accurate. (Crista Cowan)

In 2017, I basically asked the same questions of all interviewees. I’m thinking I should change up the questions for 2018. Help me out. What would you like to hear from the experts? And do you have folks you’d like me to interview for the series in 2018? Please share!

Creating history for our descendants

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I wrote this Thanksgiving post last year and still really appreciate its message. I’m reposting it today in honor of Thanksgiving. (Perhaps I’ll make it an annual tradition!) Happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. readers.

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.)

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.