If you’ve been pondering transitioning to digital organization of your genealogy records, you may be stymied about how to get started. It can feel overwhelming and perfectionism might be paralyzing you.
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I’m almost completely paperless in my genealogy research. I started out printing and filing everything but transitioned over a few years to digital. I didn’t make a decision to go paperless on a certain date. Rather, once I had a trustworthy digital folder structure and file-naming protocol in place, I didn’t feel like I needed to print anything out. I’m lucky, in a way. I came to this after just a couple of years of serious research. So I didn’t have a huge backlog to contend with.
I get a good number of questions from folks who have been researching for years and have a whole of lot paper to show for it. They want to go digital but don’t know where to start digitizing their research. If that’s something you think about, here’s a post designed to help you get started.
Here’s what I recommend as the first steps to organizing your genealogy research digitally.
- Create a folder structure and a file-naming protocol. This is critical so you easily find your documents. I describe my folder structure and file-naming protocol in step six of this blog post.
- From this point forward, stop printing and start downloading documents you find online, using your new folder structure and file-naming protocol. If you start now, you’ll familiarize yourself with your the new file system and you won’t add to your backlog of documents to be scanned and filed.
- Start scanning, renaming and filing your paper documents. What I did was go through my paper file folders, which were organized by couple, one by one, evaluating each piece of paper and scanning documents any that I didn’t already have in electronic form. I blogged about it in a post called Marrying my electronic and paper files. This may sound tedious, but I urge you to think about this as an opportunity to check your research. Looking at each paper, you may come across evidence that you overlooked when you first filed those papers. Here’s the good news: you don’t have to take a vacation to get it done. You can do it little by little, person by person or couple by couple (depending on how your paper documents are organized).
- Recycle or shred paper after you scan it. I see no reason to hang onto the paper files you have scanned, unless they have some historical value. For example, after I carefully scanned it, I kept the epic handwritten letter my grandfather wrote my grandmother before they married.
- If you find yourself pulling a paper document out of your files to help you in your current research, go ahead and scan and file it electronically. Then toss the paper.
- It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. If you’re organizing your genealogy research digitally it’s imperative that you have a routine in place for backing up your hard drive. (Look no further than my recent experience of my backup saving my bacon when my computer died without warning.) It’s a good idea to have more than one back up.
This process reminds me of that age-old question: “How do you eat an elephant?” One bite at a time. Once you get your folder structure and file-naming protocol set up, you just take it paper by paper. Acknowledge that it will take awhile. Recognize the value of going through your old papers. And keep your eye on the prize: An easily accessible, readable and sharable archive of your genealogy records.
For detailed information on the digital organizing system I created for my research, check out my 2021 Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow. The downloadable pdf is 37 pages and available for $19.99.
Photo by Tom Woodward via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.
Thanks for posting this article. I have been thinking about doing this for several years. I think I will start with all the census that I have. On any new research I do I will download to my computer. If I transcribe something, I may make a copy only for that use and than shred. This wIll be another item to put on my 2021 goals. Hope you and your family had a nice Thanksgiving.
Thanks for your comment, Jerry. Good luck with the project!
I think that anyone who tries saving documents on a home computer for JUST ONE DAY’S research–instead of printing paper copies–is almost bound to say, “Phew! How did I ever put up with the extra work of using paper–all the printing, filing, and then retrieving from a file drawer?” “When I have to wind up the day’s research, everything is already filed and linked on the computer. I don’t have to look back at a pile of remaining papers to be filed as I dash off to work or eat or (eeek) go to bed.” Not to mention accidentally misfiled sheets, never to be seen again….
I agree 100%. Saving is so much easier than printing! Once I got a file-naming protocol in place, coupled with the habit of immediately renaming the downloaded file, I could be confident I wouldn’t lose a downloaded file on my hard drive. It’s a game changer!
For those who want to scan an existing pile of paper documents, I recommend NOT pre-sorting. Scan the top 20 sheets from the pile. Make sure each scan is clear and give each one a meaningful file name. Put it in the right digital file folder. If you keep a genealogy database, link the correct person(s) in it to each scanned image. Save or throw away those 20 sheets. When you have time for more, do another 20. The pile is shrinking. The smallish batch size of 20 will allow you to catch and re-do any poor scans before you move on. The computer will do the sorting for you.
Marian, that is an interesting approach. I can see how it would make progress feel faster. But I can also see the benefit of pre-sorting in that duplicates are easily identified and–if this important to you–it allows you the opportunity to check the documents you’re scanning against other documents for that person as part of the process.
I think it boils down to what the user wants out of the digitization process. If the goal is to get it done as quickly as possible, this is a good approach and I appreciate your bringing it up!
My pile was so high that it couldn’t be sorted before I had to clear off the dining room table for something else, and inevitably my sorted stacks would get mixed up together again. Eventually I decided that just making a little progress at a time, moving a few sheets inexorably toward the recycling bin, was the only way that I would succeed. Yes, there were duplicates and the unnecessary work of scanning and then eliminating them, but I lived with it in order to move forward.
Thanks for your follow-up comment, Marian! You make a great point that making it easy to make progress is really important. I appreciate your sharing your personal experience.
thank you for this reminder, Janine. I am pretty good with my genealogy stuff.. but when I look around me there is way too much paper on my desk from other parts of my life 🙂
You’re welcome, Barbara!