Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

A milestone

By 8 Comments

100postsIn poking around on my WordPress dashboard, I discovered that the previous post was my 100th published post on Organize Your Family History! I don’t know the significance of that, but I love a round number.

I want to thank you for reading this blog and sharing it with other people. I’ve been blogging weekly (roughly) and I really want to step it up to twice a week. Something about having over 100 blog posts makes me feel established. Please keep reading. I plan to provide quality content that you’ll find helpful in the next 100 posts (and beyond)!!

How accessible are your genealogy materials?

By 2 Comments

Pile of papersDo you have a good place to store your genealogy stuff? Many of us don’t have the luxury of a dedicated genealogy room. And even if we do, that doesn’t mean everything’s accessible. When your material isn’t easy to get to, it can be hard to do (or start) genealogy research.

Organizers talk about the concept of “prime real estate,” where you reserve the most accessible storage spaces for the most frequently accessed materials. You want to make it easy to get stuff out and put it away again. When your research materials are accessible, one barrier to doing the research vanishes.

Take a look around your genealogy research space. Here are some tell-tale clues that there’s room for improvement:

  • Papers in piles
  • Books or papers on the floor
  • Cluttered work surfaces
  • Folders or binders without labels

If you can see yourself in this description, maybe it’s time to think about improvements.

Here are some things to consider:

  • Throw alphabetical order to the wind and put the binders or file folders containing your current research front and center
  • If you use binders and you find that you pile papers rather than placing them in the right spot in the binder, consider switching to file folders. (See my earlier blog post, Folders or binders? for more info.)
  • Try to create a habit of putting papers away after you use them, or creating a small stack to file on a designated day each week
  • Use a timer to help you focus on getting rid of your backlog (file for 15 minutes a day, for instance)
  • Streamline your system with some file clean-out sessions where you get rid of duplicates or unnecessary pieces of paper
  • Label the heck out of everything! (Don’t feel like you have to use a fancy label maker…regular Avery labels printed out on your printer will do)

This isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. You don’t have to reserve an entire weekend for a complete workspace overhaul. You can make small improvements, a little at a time. (I’d start with analyzing what’s being stored in your prime real estate.)

An end-of-the-year audit of your storage space might pave the way for a breakthrough year next year!

Pin the tail on the family tree

By Leave a Comment

igleheart1900Today I had a little time to do some genealogy research, but I couldn’t decide what to work on. So I opened my family tree in my Reunion software, looking for inspiration. I noted the right sidebar had a listing of people on my tree, sorted alphabetically by last name.

I closed my eyes, scrolled up and down a few times on the sidebar and then clicked. The person I landed on was Martha Jane Ellis (1845-1919), my great great grandmother. I set to work looking at her record, looking for missing information. I pulled out the file folder for Martha and her husband, Benjamin Franklin Igelheart (1845-1913) and continuing the process of marrying my paper and electronic files. I also started adding information on siblings into Reunion, something I didn’t do in my first recording of data.

Randomizing my selection feels like a nice piece of serendipity. I sometimes prefer that to a systematic approach. It feels more fun to me and this is all about fun, right?

The value of a clean computer desktop

By Leave a Comment

My computer desktop

My computer desktop

I’m a professional organizer, but I’m not a neatnik. I’m actually a naturally messy person, though through the years I’ve managed to create habits that have kept me a bit neater. For some years, for example, I’ve managed to clear off the top of my desk at the end of each workday.

My computer desktop was another matter. I use a Mac and its robust search capabilities have meant that I never paid all that much attention to where I stored files. So my computer’s desktop was typically a cluttered mess of items that happened to land there. It didn’t bother me particularly, since I didn’t even see the desktop once I had a program or two open.

But one day last summer, I decided to clear it off. And what a difference that’s made! The process of clearing it off was really helpful. I actually found some genealogy-related files among the clutter in my desktop and I dragged them to the appropriate within my genealogy folder (the one truly organized folder on my computer). By the way, it took me only 30 minutes to go from truly cluttered to clear.

Now that my desktop is clean, it’s become a place where I can temporarily store files so I can easily find them. That’s really helpful for parking photographs that I need to upload to this blog or my Peace of Mind Organizing blog (or to Rubbermaid’s blog, where I’m a regular contributor). It’s also a helpful place to temporarily store a downloaded genealogy document until I can enter into Reunion, my family tree software.

At the end of the day, when I turn off my computer, I either file or delete the few files that landed on my desktop during the day. It’s much like how I tackle my day’s worth of clutter on my physical desktop.

If your computer desktop is cluttered up, I urge you to go through it and delete and file. I hope you find it as helpful as I did!