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Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Ancestry users: Don’t forget to check Family Search

November 6, 2020 By Janine Adams 20 Comments

My go-to genealogy resource is Ancestry.com. I find the search interface easy to use and I frequently find it helpful when I’m trying to answer a research question. I pretty much ignore the hints and I almost never consult public trees. I’m there for the vast number of documents in their collections.

But I had a couple of experiences while researching this week that reminded me not to overlook Family Search, even when I’ve found a pertinent document at Ancestry. Family Search (the LDS church’s genealogy website) sometimes has better scans or more accurate indexes of the same collections. And they may have expanded collections.

I blogged back in August 2018 in a post called No need to settle for bad scans about how I found a document on Family Search that was poorly scanned at Ancestry. It happened again this week when I was researching the family of my third great grandfather, Henry S. Garlock (1817-1909). The issue was that the main information in the 1885 Iowa census was legible, but the column headers were fuzzy. So I did a Google search looking for an explanation of the column headers. And that led me to a much more clear scan at Family Search.

Here they are side by side (click the photo to see them larger):

The next day, working on this same family, I was examining a document I’d downloaded from Ancestry that was for the 1905 Iowa census. It provided so little information I clicked on  “About this collection” on Ancestry and all it said was, “This collection includes census records from Iowa in 1905. You can learn more about this collection at the FamilySearch website.” When I clicked on that link I discovered that the 1905 Iowa Census consisted of individual cards for each person and the page I’d downloaded from Ancestry was simply an index to those cards!

This is the census document I found on Ancestry:

And this is an example of one of the cards. So much more information!

It was nice to have this important reminder to check more than one repository for important information. I hope it helps you!

Filed Under: Challenges, Genealogy tips Tagged With: electronic files, Garlock, genealogy tools, research, technology

Quick Tip #5: Start your digital file name with a year

August 25, 2020 By Janine Adams 11 Comments

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 worked well for me and is worth consideration.

Start your file name for your digital documents with the year of the document

As I mentioned in my first Quick Tip, I start my file names with the year of the document (click on the link to see the rest of the file-naming protocol). I’ve been doing this from the beginning–I’m sure at someone else’s advice. It has proven to be so beneficial. Here’s why:

  • It puts my files in chronological order when I sort alphabetically. I have folders for each person I’m researching and having the files arranged chronologically makes it very easy to find a particular document.
  • It makes it easy to see what’s missing. For example, missing censuses jump out.
  • It creates a little bit of a timeline for a particular ancestor

I’ve never been tempted to stray from this practice and I frequently think about how much I appreciate it. Like everything else, this is something that works for me and may not necessarily work for the way you think. But when I feel passionate about something–particularly if it has to do with organizing–I like to share!

Filed Under: Genealogy tips Tagged With: electronic files, quick tips

Time for me to address my backlog

July 24, 2020 By Janine Adams 4 Comments

I hate it when I let a backlog of downloaded files build up. I know that downloading a file without gleaning the facts from it and adding it to my genealogy software does not further my research. And yet I struggle with backlogs. My most recent post on my struggle was in October 2018. That fall, I vowed to eliminate my backlog and I succeeded in doing it, sort of. I took a group of deeds I couldn’t face and moved them to a foldern unprocessed. But otherwise, I processed 79 downloaded documents by making backlog-busting my research focus.

Well, the backlog has built up again and it’s time to address it. I have 78 documents languishing in my Surnames folder, waiting to be processed and filed in their appropriate folders. I plan to announce an August 30 x 30 challenge next week and my focus in August will be to get rid of that backlog. Two years ago, I created a spreadsheet in which I kept a running tally of the numbers of files I needed to process. I found updating it every session to be quite rewarding. So I think I’ll employ that strategy again.

One reason for my large backlog is that I went on a sprint of newspaper research in June and July. I had a seven-day free trial of newspapers.com and then bought a 30-day subscription that expired July 22. I found myself downloading, but not necessarily processing, a bunch of newspaper articles. (I did process some of them, though!)

In organizing, we refer to this as backsliding. I know how to process documents. I actually enjoy processing documents. But when I let a backlog build up it quickly gets overwhelming and less enjoyable. I find that focusing on the backlog to get it back to zero brings me great peace of mind.

In order to succeed at getting rid of my backlog, I know I have to avoid downloading any new documents while I’m focused on the backlog. Any documents I do download, I must commit to processing in the same research session. That way the number of documents left to process goes down every day. (Come to think about it, that’s not unlike dealing with physical clutter, credit card debt or any number of other scenarios!)

I bet I’m not the only one dealing with a backlog of genealogy documents (either digital or paper) that have been collected but not dealt with. If you have a backlog, feel free to join me in backlog busting in August!

Filed Under: Challenges, Organizing Tagged With: backlog, electronic files, research, time management

How I process Newspapers.com articles

July 10, 2020 By Janine Adams 18 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of research on Newspapers.com recently. I downloaded a number of articles about my maternal grandparents, Crawford and Susie (Jeffries) Brown, who lived in Spokane, Washington, from 1936 until their deaths in the 1990s. My mother, Betty Sue Brown Adams, was born in Missouri in 1933, but the family to Spokane when she was three and lived there until she left for college.

The Spokesman-Review, Spokane’s daily paper, is part of Newspapers.com Publisher Extra collection. I did a seven-day free trial with them and when it was over I still I had research I wanted to do, so I signed up for a 30-day subscription for $19.99. (I didn’t want to spend $60 for a six-month subscription.) With the clock ticking, I’ve been downloading articles and also working through my backlog of downloaded articles. In doing so much research on Newspapers.com, I’ve developed a method of downloading and processing the articles that I thought I’d share with you here with some screenshots in case it’s helpful.

As always, I’m sharing what works for me…that doesn’t make it the right way or the best way. And it doesn’t mean I won’t change it up later. But this is what I’m doing now. (Several years ago, I did a screencast of how I process newspaper articles from Genealogy Bank, which was slightly different. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.)

When you find an article on Newspapers.com, you have the option to clip the article so that you find it later on Newspapers.com and others can see it (you can also download, share or save on Ancestry.com by clipping an article), or you can print or save the article. Because I don’t plan to keep my Publisher’s Extra subscription and because I prefer to download everything to my hard drive, I choose to the download the article and also to download the entire page it is on, for context. Here’s what I do:

Once I’ve found an article that I want to save (in this example, it’s a 1943 article about my ten-year-old mother performing in a musical program at a PTA meeting), I click on Print/Save.

Then I click on Select portion of page. (Click on any of these images to make them larger.)

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step OneThen I outline the article using Newspaper.com’s grab tool and click Save.

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step One

Once I click Save, I’m given an option of saving it as a jpg or a pdf. When you save as a pdf, the source information is included. I always save a clip as a pdf.

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step Three

Once I click Save as PDF, the article is downloaded to my hard drive. When I open it, it looks like this:

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step Four

You can see that Newspapers.com has included the newspaper title, date, and page number of the article, as well as the date it was downloaded and the URL for the image. This is really helpful when I create the source citation in Reunion, the genealogy software I use on my Mac. Notice that I have changed the filename of the article per my file-naming protocol. I always put “clip” in the filename for the clipped articles, since I will also download the entire page using the same filename (minus “clip”). I save the article in my Surnames folder.

Next, I go back to newspapers.com, click on Print/Save again, and this time select Entire Page. Then I’m asked if I want to save it as a jpg or pdf. I always save the whole page, as a jpg. That’s just my personal preference.

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step FourOnce I click Save as JPG, the page is downloaded and I change the filename to match the clip’s filename (omitting the word “clip.”)

Now it’s time to glean information from the article and add it to Reunion.

I take a fact from the article, enter it into Reunion and create a source citation. In Reunion, I use the template for Newspapers to create my source citations. So here’s what the source record for this article looks like (again, click any image for a larger view):

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step FiveNote that I have attached both files, the clip and the whole page, as multimedia files in the source citation, by simply dragging them from the Finder. But before I do that, I do one other thing. I click on the little clipboard icon in the Preview pane and I paste the citation into the metadata of the file. Here’s how I do that.

I highlight the two files (article and whole page) in Finder, right (or control) click on them and then select Get Info. That brings up the metadata for those files. I paste the source citation in the Comments field. This is really helpful later on if I want to see which source a particular file is attached to.

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step Six

Then I drag the files into the source record. After I’ve gleaned all the information from the articles, I file them in my folder structure.

A final note: In this particular example, you might be curious how I entered this tidbit about a musical program in Reunion. Under Residence in the Events tab, I added the date of the newspaper article and Spokane, recording that my mother lived in Spokane on 16 May 1943.  But I took it a little further. This was one of six Spokesman-Review articles I found about my mother performing as a girl. So in the Notes tab I also created a little listing of those performances. Here’s a screenshot:

Processing an article from Newspapers.comI don’t know if it looks complicated laid out like this, but it really isn’t. I pretty easily got into the rhythm of it. The process can get a little tedious, but I think it’s worth the effort to have both the clip and the whole page downloaded. The little nuggets you get from newspaper research can really paint a great picture!

 

Filed Under: Challenges, Genealogy tips, Organizing, Technology Tagged With: Brown, electronic files, genealogy tools, newspaper clippings, newspapers, organizing aids, research, source documentation

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about me

I'm Janine Adams, a professional organizer and a genealogy enthusiast. I love doing family history research, but I find it's very easy for me to get overwhelmed and not know where to turn next. So I'm working hard to stay organized and feel in control as I grow my family tree.

In this blog, I share my discoveries and explorations, along with my organizing challenges (and solutions). I hope by sharing what I learn along the way I'll be able to help you stay focused and have fun while you do your research, too.

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