Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Raise your hand if you’re going to RootsTech!

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RootsTech 2018 is a little later than usual (February 28 to March 2) and I’ve just today started to focus on it. I deleted last year’s app on my so that I could download this year’s version. Turns out, if I’d read this blog post, titled 7 Ways the Mobile App Will Enhance Your RootsTech Experience I would have realized that all had to do was open the 2017 app, tap Exit to Show List, and select RootsTech 2018.

The app really is robust, allowing you to access information about conference sessions, exhibitors, schedules and more in a variety of ways. I’m going to make sure I budget some time in advance of the conference to go through it and put sessions on the app’s schedule so I’m not feeling stressed while at the conference.

Apparently 15,000 attendees are expected at this year’s conference to learn from their choice of 300 sessions and 200 exhibitors. I can’t believe I can attend a conference of that scope and not feel completely overwhelmed. It really is very well organized. One thing I’ve learned is to schedule down time and give myself permission to skip a conference session if I’m feeling exhausted. (I find that being around so many people can be draining.) If you’re attending for the first time you might want to check out this RootsTech blog post, A Survival Guide to RootsTech.

In years past I’ve had a great time meeting readers of this blog at RootsTech. If you’re going and you’d like to say hi in person, just leave a note in the comments and we’ll figure that out. I hope to meet some of you in person this year!

A simple tip for accessing Family Search documents

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Last weekend I went to the St. Louis County Library’s genealogy room to access some documents I’d found on Family Search that were only available for viewing from the Family History Library or an affiliate library. I had stored links to these documents in Evernote until I had a few lookups to do.

When I got there and logged on to the library’s wifi, I was disappointed to get the same message I’d received at home (pictured above). I consulted with the librarian, who was able to access the first document on her computer. She didn’t know why I couldn’t access it on mine, but suggested I use the library’s computers. I did that, but I would have much preferred being on my own laptop, since the documents I was trying to access were hyperlinked on my computer. (I didn’t think of accessing my Evernote account on the library’s computer.) I also would have much preferred to download the documents directly to my computer, rather than onto a flash drive. And I didn’t enjoy fumbling around with Windows when I’m used to a Mac.

When I got home, I realized I’d not properly captured the source information. So back I went to the library three days later.

I had the same problem accessing the documents and I asked a different librarian for help. He made a brilliant suggestion:

Try another browser.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. I like to use Safari on my Mac, but Safari sometimes doesn’t play well with others. When I tried to access the document on Chrome, there it was.

So if you’re in a library where you should be able to access a Family Search document and can’t, just try another browser.

Edited to add: According to some comments I received on Facebook, this browsing-switching phenomenon as it relates to Family Search might be specific to the St. Louis County Library. So your mileage may vary.

Backing up Evernote on a Mac (updated)

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I like storing important files on my hard drive, not in the cloud. Call it unreasonable, but I have a distrust of the cloud. Yet I love Evernote, the cloud-based note-taking and information storing app. In fact I depend on it for many facets of my personal, business, and genealogy lives. So I was thrilled when reader Corbin Dodge, J.D., was kind enough to spell out instructions for backing up Evernote to your hard drive, after I expressed my fear of what would happen if Evernote vanished, in a comment on my blog post How I store my genealogy information. I went through all the steps of Corbin’s clear and detailed instructions and now have such peace of mind knowing that my notes are safe and easily accessible outside of the Evernote app. (I back up my hard drive to an external hard drive and to the cloud.) I didn’t want this valuable information to remain buried in the comments, so Corbin has graciously agreed to let me reprint them here. [Note: Evernote issued an update which changed the way the backup is created. This post has been updated to include the new instructions.]

I share your concerns re: what if an app goes belly up (what nightmares are made of!).

One thing I admire about Evernote is that it is easy to backup your notes so they’re accessible even if the app goes away. To do this on Mac:

(1) select the “Notes” heading in the sidebar

(2) On mac, hold down the command key and the “A” key at the same time, which will select all notes (on PC, hold down the control key and the “A” key at the same time)
(3) On the main menu bar, click “File”, then select “Export notes…”
(4) A window will pop up. There is a drop-down box labeled “Format”. It gives you 2 options. Choose “HTML”
(5) Save*

To access the backups, click on any note in the folder. It will open in your default browser. You can backspace out the note name in the url to get the full table of contents of every note that was backed up. Not as smooth to browse as the app, but reassuring to know your notes are accessible even if Evernote goes away! It also saves the images, albeit as a separate image file

*I’ve found this folder structure works well to organize backups for my various apps:
Dropbox / Backups / Evernote / 2017-09-27 Evernote Backup

Selecting the HTML format is a safeguard in case Evernote ceases to exist. The alternate option is to save them as “Evernote XML Format (.enex)”, which is an Evernote-specific file format which saves more metadata about each note (e.g., notebooks, tags, author), so this choice could be useful if you ever need to restore lost notes into Evernote (i.e., if their sync ever messes up). The downside to .enex is that it’s not a universally-friendly file format, so it wouldn’t do you much good if Evernote ever goes kaput.

p.s., an added benefit of backing your notebooks up in HTML format is that you can easily go back and retrieve a previous version of any single note without affecting all of your Evernote notebooks (which would be the case if you didn’t select “HTML” in step 3.

You can learn about Corbin’s digital marketing business at corbin-dodge.com and read about his adventures renovating his 100+ year home at eastwoodbungalow.com. Thank you, Corbin!

 

How I process a downloaded document

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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.

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.