Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick Tip #15: Resist the urge to print

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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 changed my genealogy life.

Resist the urge to print

As a professional organizer, I know what a problem paper clutter can be. And I know how hard it can be to access unfiled paper (and so much paper is unfiled!). So I am a huge proponent of not printing genealogy documents I find online. Instead, I encourage you to download and file them.

The key to feeling confident about downloading, rather than printing, is to have a reliable file-naming protocol and folder structure so that you can find the documents. Mine is detailed in this post, but yours might be different. That’s great, as long as it works for you. When you download and file digitally, rather than print and file or put into binders, your documents are always at your fingertips when you’re at your computer, even if you’re at a library or repository. It can be a mindset shift, but I think it’s worth it.

It’s important to mention, as was brought up in the comments to this post, that it’s absolutely essential to backup your hard drive if you’re going to store your documents digitally. I wrote about this in my last quick tip.

For extensive information on going paperless in your genealogy research, check out the Paperless Genealogy Guide I wrote with scanning expert Brooks Duncan, available for purchase at his website, DocumentSnap.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Quick Tip #14: Back up your data!

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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 is brief but very important.

Back up your data

If you’ve embraced digital file organization, as I have, it’s absolutely imperative to back up your data. And it’s a good idea to do it in multiple ways. I store my genealogy source documents on my hard drive and I back up my hard drive continuously through Backblaze, an automated cloud-based service. (That’s a referral link; I’ll be compensated if you use the link to sign up for BackBlaze.) I’ve been very happy with Backblaze but there are other cloud-based backup services, like Carbonite and CrashPlan, that you might consider.

I also automatically back up hourly to an external hard drive via the Time Machine program on my Mac. (I keep my external hard drive plugged in via a hub whenever my computer is at my desk, which is most of the time.) Finally, my Reunion database is stored on Dropbox, so that I can access it, via ReunionTouch, on my phone. So that’s another place the files exist. I have confidence back up system and, best of all, it’s all automatic–I never have to think about it!

Those are just the ways I back up. There are lots of other ways to do it. The important thing is to feel confident that if your hard drive failed or your computer were stolen or damaged you would not lose your precious genealogy data. If you’re not as confident, I urge you to take some steps to explore how you might improve your situation!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Handling the females in your family tree

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Most of the women in our family trees changed their name at some point or another. That can present an organizational conundrum in the files we keep for them. I thought I’d let you know how I handle it in my digital filing system. As always, I’m not telling you the right way to do anything. I just want to share how I do it, because it’s worked well for me.

In a nutshell, I file women under their married surname. As I describe in the post How I Process a Downloaded Document, on my hard drive I have surname folders for each of the surnames in my family and within each folder I have folders for individual people. In those people folders are the individuals containing source documents. (I have a separate Collateral folder within which the surname folders for collateral relatives are filed.)

Here’s how I name women’s folders:

Last Name (Birth Name), First Name (YOB-YOD). So the folder for one of my second great grandmother’s folder is called Garlock (Ten Eyck), Anna (1832-1910). It resides in the Garlock Surname folder, as shown in the screenshot above.

If I find a relative before she’s married, I’ll use her birth surname for filing purposes. But once I’ve found marriage documents, I’ll rename and move her folder to her married surname.

It seems pretty straight forward, but of course, things like multiple marriages can make it more complicated. For my direct-line ancestors, it’s easy. I use the surname associated with the spouse who is my direct line. (If it’s a second or later marriage, I don’t typically use the first married name in the folder name, I just use the birth name.)

But for collateral relatives, where there isn’t necessarily a married name that is more relevant to me than the other married names, I typically just use the first married surname that I find and leave it like that.  Sometimes I make exceptions, especially for women who were married multiple times and for whom I have trouble keeping track of their various married names. For example, Leonora Adams, the daughter of my much-researched second great grandfather George Washington Adams, was married four times. I file her within the Adams Collateral folder using the folder name “Adams, Leonora (Lochry Stevens Good Ward), 1877-1962.”

Again, I’m not suggesting this is the best way to do it, but it works for me. I pretty much developed my system as I went along. And, as in almost all things, I allow myself to be imperfect about it. That means that  there may be inconsistencies in my folder structure. But I have enough of a solid infrastructure that the inconsistencies don’t bother me.

Writing this makes me want to go through my folders–particularly for the collateral relatives–and perhaps correct any inconsistencies. But I’m comfortable leaving them as is until I get around to doing that.

I’m curious: How do you handle the name changes of women among your files? And are there any situations I didn’t cover here that you’re curious about? Feel free to ask in the comments.

 

 

Quick Tip #11: Process each document as you download it

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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. When I don’t do what I suggest in this tip, I always regret it!

Process each document as you download it

I am always battling a backlog of documents I’ve downloaded that need to be processed. By “processed” I mean creating a source citation, going through the document and gleaning facts and adding them to my Reunion database, with each fact sharing a source citation. (I describe how I process a document in this post.)

I love processing documents, actually. But when I’m in a flurry of searching, I sometimes keep downloading without processing. (Though I always rename the document, as described in Quick Tip #1.) When I let that backlog build up, I end up trying to stop myself from doing additional research until I get rid of it. I often accomplish that during a 30 x 30 challenge.

But when I’m on my game, I process as I go and it feels great. (It makes me feel like a researcher, not just a searcher.) I encourage you to give it a try if you’re not already doing it!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash