Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Who should I interview for How They Do It?

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Five years ago, I started my interview series, How They Do It, in which I ask professional genealogists and/or genealogy writers how they organize their own research. It’s sort of fallen by the wayside and I want to bring it back with gusto in 2023.

I’d love to hear from you if there are any genealogists you’d like me to ask. (And if you have a personal connection with someone, please let me know!) If you click on the link above, you can read the interviews I’ve done already.

It’s a pretty easy process: The interviews are done via email, I ask everyone the same questions (with occasional tweaking), and the interviewee is welcome to skip any questions that feel onerous or irrelevant. I ask them to submit a headshot, bio, and, ideally, a photo of their genealogy research space.

Here are the genealogists I’ve been lucky enough to interview for this series since it began on January 3, 2017 (in alphabetical order):

  • Lisa Alzo
  • Donna Cox Baker
  • Melissa Barker
  • Kenyatta D. Berry
  • Lisa Louise Cooke
  • Kitty Cooper
  • Crista Cowan
  • Amy Johnson Crow
  • Diana Elder
  • Nathan Dylan Goodwin
  • Julie Goucher
  • Michael Lacopo
  • David Allen Lambert
  • Denise May Levenick
  • Thomas MacEntee
  • Julie Miller
  • Sunny Morton
  • Gena Philibert-Ortega
  • Pat Richley-Erickson
  • Barbara Schmidt
  • Randy Seaver
  • Drew Smith
  • Megan Smolenyak
  • Diahan Southard
  • Paula Stuart-Warren
  • D. Joshua Taylor
  • Amie Bowser Tennant
  • Marion Burk Wood

I’m poised to send out interview invitations, so please help me out with any names. If you’re a pro genealogist or genealogy writer and haven’t done one of these interviews with me, please feel free to volunteer yourself!

You can put your suggestions in the comments or email me at janine@organizeyourfamilyhistory.com. Thanks!

How do I start going digital?

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A year ago, I posted this article under the name Getting Started Going Digital. I think it’s an important topic, so I decided to run it again today. If you find this topic engaging, I encourage you to click on the link for the original article and look at the comments–reader Marian added interesting insights on approaching an overwhelming pile of papers.

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

 

What is a perfectionist?

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I co-host a weekly podcast called Getting to Good Enough, all about letting go of perfectionism so you can do more of what you love. Each week, my co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and I discuss getting past perfectionism in some aspect of life.

I’ve internalized a definition of perfectionism that I first learned from time-management guru Harold L. Taylor more than a dozen years ago. This definition rings true for me and informs a lot of what I do. I thought I’d share it with you because I think it applies to genealogy and, really, to everything we do.

A perfectionist is someone who spends more time on a task than it merits.

Next time you’re spending a lot of time trying to get something just right, ask yourself whether the task really merits that effort. It can be a great way to let good enough be good enough. And that can save you time, effort and angst.

Let’s create history for our descendants this Thanksgiving

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I originally wrote this post in 2016, and I like repeating it on Thanksgiving where we might once again be getting together for a meal with our loved ones. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.) Or we can do what Stacy Julian does and ask our relatives to fill out a simple form.

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

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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.