Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

The benefits (and challenges) of cleaning up your research area

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Over on my organizing blog, I’m doing a Tiny Projects challenge, in which each day this week I am accomplishing one tiny organizing project in my home and blogging about it. Today, I tackled the reach-in closet in my office. (You can read about it and see the before and after pictures here.) That closet holds mostly genealogy stuff.

Since I don’t print or download genealogy documents, I don’t have a lot of paper genealogy clutter. But when I spent a half hour creating order in that closet I realized that I have some genealogy-related projects lurking in there that weren’t even on my radar.

I discovered that I had a bunch of photos of ancestors–I didn’t look at them carefully but they look to be 50-100 years old or more. I’m sure they were passed along to me by a relative and my intention is to scan and file them in my genealogy filing system. They were scattered on the surface of the main shelf in the closet. That closet is equipped with an Elfa system (I blogged about that back in the day when I installed it). There is one larger shelf that could serve as a desk. So while I was tidying and organizing, I gathered up the photos and put them in a container that I labeled “photos to process” and placed it on the main shelf so it can’t hide from me.

I also have a container full of genealogy journals to read. I added to it today. It’s really just the two publications that the National Genealogical Society sends to its members, as well as the Missouri genealogical society’s journal. Back in January 2019, I vowed to skim them, but in fact I haven’t.

I feel I need to fish or cut bait here. Either I carve out some time to read them (perhaps during an October 30 x 30 challenge?) or decide I’m not going to read them and then find them a home with someone else.

I rather like the idea of devoting 30 minutes a day for a month (or less if it goes more quickly) to see what I can glean from these publications. But it can’t be this month!

I’m really glad I cleaned out this closet, but I’m a little sad that two big projects emerged (the photos and the journals). I can’t believe I’m complaining about it, though. These are treasures I’m fortunate to possess, not burdens to be dealt with!

If it’s been awhile since you cleaned up your genealogy space, you may have some pleasant surprises hiding in there!

30 x 30: Time for a mid-month check in!

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For those of you who are participating in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge (in which we endeavor to do 30 minutes of genealogy research every day for 30 days), how’s it going? It’s almost halfway through the month. Have you found that the challenge is prompting to you to get more research (or organizing) done than you might have otherwise?

I’ve had a great couple of weeks. I’ve researched every day. A couple of those sessions were shorter than 30 minutes. One was about five minutes, just so I wouldn’t break the chain of daily research. This month I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of my efforts at reducing my backlog and I included a column on how much time I spent. So I can tell you that in 13 days , I have spent 6 hours and 45 minutes researching. (I think it’s very cool that Numbers allows me to enter minutes then totals it up for me in hours.) That’s an average of 31 minutes a day. Woot!

I have been focusing on eliminating my backlog of unprocessed documents, though it’s going more slowly than I might have hoped. I have so far reduced the backlog by 24 documents. I’m finding that the processing is revealing questions and mysteries that are diverting me a little. But I have added only three new documents in the last two weeks! In any case, this slow and steady approach has been enjoyable. And the short, daily sessions is keeping me in touch with my research, which is always a great benefit.

I am confident that I would not have prioritized research if it weren’t for the challenge. I am so grateful to all of you for providing me with accountability.

Your turn: If you’re among the 30 or so folks who signed on to the challenge (or even you didn’t sign on but are participating), please let the rest of us know how it’s going!

Quick Tip #4: Grab a URL when you download a document

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Here’s the next in my series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) high-impact post every couple of weeks. This one has saved me a lot of time in the past when I’ve let unprocessed files pile up.

Grab a URL when you download a document

When I’m researching mindfully, I process a document as soon as I download it, before I move on to anything else. (And by that I mean create a sort citation, glean all the information from the document and add it to my genealogy software.) But as I revealed in a recent post about my backlog, sometimes the reality is that downloaded documents languish before being processed. (I do always change the filename as soon as I download, though.)

One thing I’ve trained myself to do if I realize I’m not going to have a chance to process a document on the spot is to copy the URL of the document and paste it into the metadata of the file so that I can easily see the document online again. Often I want to look at the context of the document, so I want to look at the website, not just the image I downloaded.

To accomplish this on my MacBook, I copy the URL from the website first. Then, after I’ve renamed the file, I right (or control) click on the filename and select Get Info. (Or, as a reader pointed out to me, I can just click on the filename and press Command+I!) That pulls up the information pane. I simply paste the URL into the Comments section. When I finally get around to processing it, it’s very easy to copy and paste the URL into my browser to see it again.

I think, but I’m not positive, that the same thing is accomplished in Windows by right-clicking on a file, selecting Properties and then clicking on the Details tab. If I’m wrong about that, please correct me in the comments!

Is any detail too trivial to record?

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I’ve been working on processing my backlog of newspaper articles that I downloaded during my burst of newspaper research in June and July. I don’t know about you, but when I’m doing newspaper research (or, really, any genealogy research), it can be tempting not to go to the trouble of downloading everything I find because it doesn’t seem important enough. And when I’m in the midst of a research session sometimes the downloading (or printing or copying, if I’m actually looking at paper documents) can seem so tedious that I only bother with the big stuff.

Come to think about it, that’s one advantage of short, frequent research sessions that I should add to my post The value of daily research. Since I don’t get bleary-eyed or weary during short sessions, I’m more likely to make the effort to download everything.

In any case, this week, as I was processing some newspaper articles, I was so happy that I had taken the effort to download even the tiniest articles. For example, there was an article in The Clinton Eye of Clinton, Henry, Missouri about my grandmother, Susie Jeffries Brown (1907-1999), having her tonsils and adenoids out on August 26, 1919. I didn’t think much of it when I downloaded it, but as I processed it, I noticed that the surgery took place 50 miles from her home in Rockville, Bates, Missouri and that it happened two days after her twelfth birthday.

I paused to think about whether 12-year-old Susie might have spent her birthday full of trepidation about the surgery and I wondered how long she stayed in the hospital. Was she served ice cream? (That always seemed to be the best part of getting your tonsils out when I was a kid.) It prompted me to do a little more research and I learned that by 1919 tonsillectomies were growing more prevalent (in fact hers was one of three mentioned in the newspaper article!), though they exploded in popularity in the 1920s. (If you’re as big a nerd as me and feel like digging into the topic, you can read The Rise and Decline of Tonsillectomies from The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (vol. 62, No. 4, October 2007) at JSTOR.)

I was lucky enough to have known my grandmother, who died in her 90s when I was in my 30s. But I almost always think of her as a senior citizen. Sometimes I think of her as a  mother of young children, as I recall stories my mother told me about her childhood. But I don’t know much about my grandmother’s childhood, mostly because I was lousy listener as a kid and young adult.

So this little newspaper article added to my understanding of my grandmother’s childhood and, perhaps more importantly, gave me reason to think about her as a child.

Whenever I’m tempted to skip downloading something, I’m going to remember that trivial things can often provide great clues when taken together with other clues found over time. That makes them important to capture. But even when they’re truly trivial, they can provide valuable little insights.