Quick Tip #24: Keep your folder structure simple

Here’s the next in my occasional 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) post every couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This one has saved me a lot of time in filing and retrieving documents from my hard drive.

Keep your folder structure simple

There’s a tendency to think a complicated organizational system is a good one. I think the opposite is true. The simpler we can make a system, the easier it is to maintain.

This is true for your folder structure for your genealogy source documents. There’s no best way to organize your folders. You could file documents by surname, location, type of document…whatever works for you. But I urge you to keep it simple. I file my documents by surname and have created a folder structure with individual folders for each ancestor within a single surname (with an additional layer for collateral relatives). I describe my folder structure briefly in Step 6 of this post and in more depth in my Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow.)

I could have chosen to nest the folders by generation, which would have had me click my way through a family tree to find a document. But that is unnecessarily complex in my view. My simple folder structure allows me to file easily and find documents easily. (And that means I actually file!) And it allows me to see all the documents I have for a single ancestor in one place.

My goal for all organizing systems is to make them as simple and streamlined as possible. I think this definitely applies to the folder structure on our hard drives!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash