Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

What’s your biggest organizing challenge?

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questionmarkI polled readers last month to find out what you’d like to read here. The top vote getter was “Organizing tips and tricks.” I’m in my tenth year as a professional organizer, so, as you can imagine, I have a lot of organizing tricks up my sleeve. But in thinking about what to share with you, I realized it would be really helpful to know your biggest challenges with regard to organizing your family history research.

So can you please help me help you by letting me know what you struggle with?

Is it setting up a filing system? Keeping track of sources? Finding things on your hard drive? A cluttered genealogy workspace? No genealogy workspace? Finding time to do research? Not letting genealogy research take over your life? A backlog of stuff that needs to be organized?

Please don’t limit yourself to those suggestions. Just post a comment stating any and all genealogy-related organizing challenges so I can try to address them in future posts.

Thank you!

Paper vs electronic: What a difference two years makes!

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paperpilecroppedI just took another gander at a blog post I wrote on August 16, 2012, called How I organize my family history research. I still organize my research papers the same way I described in that post–my filing system has withstood the test of time.

But what really jumped out at me was this paragraph:

…I have to tell you that I’m a paper person. I know I could (and perhaps should) save documents, like census images, as pdfs and just organize them on my computer. But I really like printing them out and keeping them in files. So that’s what I do.

I’m pretty happy to report that times have changed. I’ve created an electronic file system that allows me to find  documents on my computer easily (though I’m still discovering files that haven’t been properly named or filed). So now I don’t feel the need to print everything and put them in files. It’s positively liberating.

That means my files are available wherever my laptop is. (Or my iPad, since much of my genealogy research is also stored in Dropbox.) I can do research from any room in the house, or any room in the world, for that matter.

Back in May, I extolled the virtues of going paperless. I am so happy that my need to print is vanishing!

Yes, my paper filing system is working well. But these days, I use it only for retrieving documents I filed there in the past. I’m just not adding to it. And that’s okay by me!

 

Mid-quarter progress report

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My strategy for focusing my genealogy efforts in 2014At the end of last year, I devised a scheme for 2014 in which I’d focus on one of my family lines per quarter. The idea was to keep my research focused and to have a list of organizing-related tasks for each line that I’d want to have completed by the end of the quarter.

We’re just past the half way point of the quarter, and I thought it was time I took stock of how this scheme was working out.

First, I will say that it has been really helpful having a single line (this quarter, it’s my father’s father’s line, the Adamses) that I’m focusing on. It’s diminished the overwhelming feeling I sometimes get when I think about getting started on a research project.

(Another big help in keeping me focused has been my Research Tracker, part of the Family History Organizer custom notebook I developed for Springpad, which you can download into your Springpad account.)

In re-reading that blog post today, I realized that I’ve doing a pretty good job on the research-related aspects of my quarterly goals:

  • Fill in collateral relatives on my family tree in Reunion
  • Search for sources for unsourced data provided to me by cousins
  • Go up at least one generation in verified information

I haven’t accomplished them all yet, but I’ve been making slow and steady progress.

Where I’m falling behind is on the ambitious list of quarterly organizing tasks I’d put together, namely:

  • Fill in the gaps on my progress tracker
  • Make sure my surname files for that line are organized on my hard drive
  • Ensure that everything in my paper files for that line is also organized on my hard drive
  • Attach photos to my family tree in Reunion

So for the rest of the month, I think I’m going to get back to marrying my electronic and paper files, and see what photos I have that I can attach to my family tree. And I’ll pull out my progress tracker and make sure it’s up to date.

What I like about this quarterly plan is that it’s adding a little urgency to the activities, by providing a deadline after which I switch focus. And it’s helping me clear an organizing backlog. At year’s end, my electronic files should be in a great shape, I should know where I stand, and I will have made progress on my research. Even if I don’t accomplish all of that, I will have made progress and I can continue moving forward next year.

Of course, time will tell. But I will keep you posted on my progress!