Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

How indexing might make me a better genealogist

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I participated in the Worldwide Indexing Event this past weekend. I’m so glad I did! I’m really grateful to Family Search for making it so easy.

By all appearances, the Worldwide Indexing Event was a big success. Almost 80,000 people participated and 7.2 million records were indexed. I indexed 541 of those records.

I ended up working at the intermediate level, indexing school censuses from Oklahoma schools in the first few decades of the 20th century. These were handwritten cards, each listing a parent and that parent’s children’s names, birth dates and ages. It was fun seeing the names and the birth dates of these kids–some of these families were large!

As I indexed, I realized that I was gaining new insights that would help me in my own genealogy research. I think seeing the challenges of interpreting handwriting, as well as the sloppiness of some of the enumerators, will help me come up with creative searches when I can’t find an ancestor in an index.

Being an indexer also made me realize how easy it is for mistakes to be made. Family Search makes indexing really easy, but if I hadn’t double-checked my work, many August birth dates would have been recorded as April. And a few boys with names like Marion would have been indexed as girls. I’m glad there are arbitrators checking the work, but now when I see errors in an index, I’m going to have a better understanding of how that happened.

Now that I’ve dipped my toe in the indexing pool, I’m going to try to do some indexing for Family Search on a regular basis. If you haven’t tried it, I encourage you to give it a try. Just go to FamilySearch.org, log in, and click Indexing at the top of the screen.

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.

Join the Worldwide Indexing Event this weekend!

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I just learned about Family Search’s Worldwide Indexing Event, October 20 to 22. People from all over the world will work together to index as many documents as possible this weekend. So far, almost 60,000 people (including me!) have signed up.

I’ve long wanted to help with indexing since I know how helpful it is to find indexed documents and I’m so grateful to Family Search for making these documents (and indexes) freely available. A few years ago, I tried to volunteer to index but at the time it required downloading software and the indexing software–despite my best efforts and calls to tech support–simply would not play nicely with my Mac.

Things have changed! One can now index via the web, so no software is required.

Before committing, I thought I’d give it a try. I searched the available indexing opportunities and indicated I was interested in beginner level batches in the United States. I selected Divorce Records from Colorado, 1900-1939. The instructions and the indexing form were clear and I quickly indexed my first batch of ten divorce documents. I’ll hold off until Friday to do more, but I found the process enjoyable. Some day soon, perhaps, I’ll graduate to more challenging documents (these divorce records were typewritten), but I’m setting myself up for success by at least starting out with beginner documents this weekend.

I can’t wait to learn how many documents are indexed this weekend. Think of all the genealogy researchers who will be helped. I’m excited to be a part of it!

NARA’s 2017 Virtual Genealogy Fair is coming up

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Once again, the National Archives is having a Virtual Genealogy Fair, with a day’s worth of lectures available free of charge. This is the fifth year in a row they’ve offered this webcast.

You can read the lineup here. Detailed descriptions of the sessions are posted here, which is also where handouts will be posted when they’re available. (Classes are marked either Beginner” or “Experienced.”) There will be six one-hour sessions each day, including one on storing and handling family heirlooms.

Since I live in St. Louis, I’m excited that two of the sessions are about the National Archives facility in St. Louis, including one on accessing records burned in the big fire there in 1973.

The event takes place on Wednesday, October 25, starting at 10 am Eastern time and ending with closing remarks at 4 pm. I’ll be traveling that day, so I won’t be able to watch live, but I’m thrilled that the recordings will be available for a period of time after October 25.

Here’s a link to the YouTube Channel where you can watch the sessions. No registration is required!