Today I had what I thought was a great idea to write about how I handle married women in my digital files in my own research. But I searched my blog and discovered I’d written about just over a year ago! I still think it’s an interesting topic, so I’m re-running the original post, slightly edited. One thing I discovered with the comments to the original post is that the way I do it may not be the standard way! Most, if not all, of the commenters last year said that they organize the women in their family trees by their birth surname. (I object to the term “maiden name” so will stick to my preferred term, “birth name.”)
I’m by no means saying my way is the right way, but it’s worked well for me for years. I encourage you to read the comments to the original post (linked above), to see how the dozen or so commenters are handling their female ancestors and relatives.
Handling the females in your family tree
Most of the women in our family trees changed their name at some point or another. That can present an organizational conundrum in the files we keep for them. I thought I’d let you know how I handle it in my digital filing system. As always, I’m not telling you the right way to do anything. I just want to share how I do it, because it’s worked well for me.
In a nutshell, I file women under their married surname. (By contrast, in my genealogy software, Reunion, all the women are listed by their birth names and if I don’t know their birth name, I leave the surname blank.) As I describe in the post How I Process a Downloaded Document, I have surname folders on my hard drive for each of the surnames I have researched and within each folder I have folders for individual people. The folders for individuals contain the source documents pertaining to that person. (I have a separate Collateral folder within which the surname folders for collateral relatives are filed using the same folder structure.)
Here’s how I name women’s folders:
Last Name (Birth Name), First Name (YOB-YOD). So the folder for one of my second great grandmother’s folder is called Garlock (Ten Eyck), Anna (1832-1910). It resides in the Garlock Surname folder, as shown in the screenshot above.
If I find a relative before she’s married, I’ll use her birth surname for filing purposes. But once I’ve found marriage documents, I’ll rename and move her folder to her married surname.
It seems pretty straight forward, but of course, things like multiple marriages can make it more complicated. For my direct-line ancestors, it’s easy. I use the surname associated with the spouse who is my direct line. (If it’s a second or later marriage, I don’t typically use the first married name in the folder name, I just use the birth name.)
But for collateral relatives, where there isn’t necessarily a married name that is more relevant to me than the other married names, I typically just use the first married surname that I find and leave it like that. Sometimes I make exceptions, especially for women who were married multiple times and for whom I have trouble keeping track of their various married names. For example, Leonora Adams, the daughter of my much-researched second great grandfather George Washington Adams, was married four times. I file her within the Adams Collateral folder using the folder name “Adams, Leonora (Lochry Stevens Good Ward), 1877-1962.”
Again, I’m not suggesting this is the best way to do it, but it works for me. I pretty much developed my system as I went along. And, as in almost all things, I allow myself to be imperfect about it. That means that there may be inconsistencies in my folder structure. But I have enough of a solid infrastructure that the inconsistencies don’t bother me.
Writing this makes me want to go through my folders–particularly for the collateral relatives–and perhaps correct any inconsistencies. But I’m comfortable leaving them as is until I get around to doing that.
I’d love to hear in the comments how you handle the name changes of women in your files. And are there any situations I didn’t cover here that you’re curious about? Feel free to ask in the comments.
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 available for $19.99.
I enjoyed your presentation today on the MyHeritage Facebook video. I use a Mac, Time Machine, Reunion, and Evernote, too, and it was great to see you put them through their paces. I wish that more of the online genealogy presenters could do that. Keep it up!
For the purposes of name digital documents, I generally use the birth name or married name(s) as it occurs in the document itself. Since my Reunion source citation links to the correct folder and file automatically, Reunion (and I) can find it easily regardless of the file name.
By the way, I keep a lot of old family photos in the Mac’s Photos library, with the description and names in the Info window there. Have you played with it?
Thanks for attending the MyHeritage FB Live, Marian! I’m glad you enjoyed it. And I love that we use the same tools for organizing our genealogy research.
How interesting that you use the name that’s in the document! I can see the sense in that. How about your folders, though. Do you have folders for individuals that their documents are stored in? If so, what name do you use in the folders?
You’ll probably regret asking, Janine. Feel free to pare this down or cut it altogether if it’s too much. Possibly I should explain that I pursue a lot of collaterals, which results in more files than some people would need.
I don’t like having to click through subfolders to find files or to save them. (I have shaky hands sometimes, and Geoff Rasmussen says we each have a lifetime click limit–wouldn’t want to use that up.) When I tried using a subfolder-per-person or -per-couple, things got misfiled too often. So, to contain my record images, I have just a few folders for my four grandparents’ birth surnames. I save hundreds (maybe thousands) of documents in each of them, according to which grandparent connects me to that person.
My file names are usually formed as (approximately):
Lastname-Firstnames-Year-Event.
Sometimes the year has to expand to a full date (yyyy-mm-dd), as when there’s a court case with a lot of events in one year that I’d like to keep in date order for analyzing the whole mess.
As with your own file naming convention, it’s pretty easy to tell what a document is from its name, and all of Jane Smith’s records clump together in the list view of the Higbee folder, which gives me the same visual sense of grouping as giving Jane her own folder. Occasionally I’ll run into a conflict when the same person had two obituaries or something, but the Mac warns me that I’m about to replace an existing file, so I add something else to make the names a little different from each other.
There are several Obadiah Higbees whose lifetimes overlap, so their document filenames are interleaved together in an alphabetic listing, but they haven’t turned out to be much of a problem, because Reunion treats them separately. Most of the time while I’m researching, I’m looking at a document image and Reunion’s list of known events and facts in the target person’s life–not the list of filenames in a folder.
I save only one copy of a census page image, no matter how many people of interest are listed in it. Usually I name it for one person in the household (whoever is most significant to me at that moment). I use one source citation for it and attach that to every household member in the image, and that citation points to the folder and filename for the image. The same thing applies to marriage records, newspaper articles, and other documents that mention several family members.
Honestly, genealogy software that links to my digital images is a like having a perfect secretary who always knows which document I’m about to need and lays it in front of me the instant when I click on that link in the source citation. Thank you, Jeeves.
Oh my gosh, Marian. I’m not at all sorry I asked! I can visualize your system and see how it could work well. I find myself wanting to hold tight to my folders but I can see how just having a single folder per line could be freeing, though to be honest it feels a little overwhelming to me. But it proves the point that what works for me might not work for you and vice versa.
I agree that the ability to link each file to the source record in Reunion makes everything so easy. I love it!
I came across your blog here first as I was just cross-checking options on how others do this. I think I was bristling at calling my mother (recently deceased) by her birth name in my files – a name that was so long in her past and by which she hardly was known… She was known for over 50 years by her married name; it seems more natural that she should be remembered in the files and for posterity that way, too! I think I will probably adopt your method. Plus, it keeps her files with my dad’s, which is nice in searches. And, while I would hope that someday all my efforts would mean something to someone, all of this attention to detail (formatting of file names, scanning to TIFFS and dpi’s, etc.) is going to result in someone hitting the delete button and taking all those stupid old photos with the pencil-writing on the back to Goodwill or the trashcan… sigh… Thank you for your wonderful post! 🙂
Susan, I’m glad you found this post helpful! My system makes sense to me and as an amateur genealogist I feel find deviating from the norm. I will point out, though, that I use birth names for the women in my tree in my genealogy software. (I use Reunion.)
As an aside, I have to ask: Are you the Susan Easterly who wrote cat books? I was a member of the Cat Writers Association back in the day and wrote one cat book, How to Say It to Your Cat. Mostly I wrote dog books.