Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Now’s a great time to go paperless

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Have you been thinking about going paperless with your genealogy? I made that transition about six years ago and have never looked back. In 2015, I wrote a post called 8 reasons not to print that pretty well spells out my reasoning behind embracing digital organizing.

Making that transition is the kind of thing that you might be putting off, thinking you’ll need time to think it through and come up with and implement a plan. Most of us are not working at this time of COVID-19, so now might be a good time to start the process. And here’s a great (if I say so myself) resource to help you get started: The Paperless Genealogy Guide, a  40-plus-page downloadable pdf that I wrote in 2017 with scanning expert Brooks Duncan of DocumentSnap. We wrote the guide as we were working on the Going Digital talk we gave together at RootsTech that year.

One thing I want to make clear as you’re pondering going transitioning to digital: You don’t have to scan your existing paper files all at once. Just figure out what your digital workflow will be (here’s mine) and think about your digital file naming convention and computer folder structure. Once you know those things, you can just start with next document you find online. Rather than print it, just do this: rename it, process it and then file it digitally. You can then work on the backlog a file folder (or half hour) at a time until it’s done. But the key is not to add to the backlog. From this point forward process all incoming documents digitally.

So that it’s handy, I’ll share with you my file-naming protocol and folder structure. They’ve been working well for me for years but of course you might have or come up with something that works better for you.

My file-naming protocol:

Year Document Type-Ancestor Name-Locality of document

Example: 1938 death certificate-George Washington Adams-Indianapolis Indiana

My folder structure:

Genealogy/Surnames/[Surname]/Last Name, First Name, YOB-YOD

Example: Genealogy/Surnames/Adams/Adams, George Washington, 1845-1938

I have a folder for each individual. For married women, I file them under their married name (if there’s more than one, I use the one pertains to me) and put their birth name in parentheses.

Example of wife: Genealogy/Surnames/Adams/Adams (McEuen), Henrietta, 1847-1902

This is the kind of information that’s covered in The Paperless Genealogy, along with a lot more. The guide also includes information on selecting a scanner, keeping your data safe, and what you do (and don’t) need to get started. It also includes our Paperless Genealogy Checklist to walk you through the steps you need to take. The Paperless Genealogy is $9 and available instantly. Read more about it and purchase it at the DocumentSnap website.

Putting my imperfectionism to work

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As I wrote in a post last week, I’ve been working on processing my 2nd great grandfather’s Civil War pension file. I got the tedious up-front source citation work completed, which involved creating source citations and labels for each of the 53 documents, affixing the labels to the paper documents and scanning the whole thing into a long pdf. I’m now working on transcribing the documents, one per day. (This is how I choose to process this type of document–I’m not saying it’s the only way or the best way, but it works for me.)

So today, I was working on Document Six and I realized that I have a typographical error in my source citation. The correct application number is 1007144 but I had typed 1006144 and copied it onto all my labels without realizing my error. That numbers appears 54 times (one for each document, plus an overall citation). Of course, it’s easy to fix in my software. But then I was faced with the pension document itself having the wrong application number on every document.

I considered my options:

  1. Fix all the labels, print them out again, affix the corrected label over the incorrect label on each document, and rescan the whole thing.
  2. Hand correct each label and rescan the whole thing.
  3. Add a notation to each label in the pdf itself
  4. Add a notation at the beginning of the pdf only

It felt like the “right’ thing to do would be option number 1. But what a pain in the butt that would be. I was okay with doing it once. But doing it a second time felt practically unbearable. Plus my printer is about to run out of toner.

I thought about what was important to me and realized that the most important citation was the one in my Reunion software (the one that I corrected in about 5 seconds). But I didn’t want my pension file pdf to be wrong, in case I pass it along to someone else.

So I added a notation in the pdf, 54 times, that says “correct application no. 1007144.” (That’s a picture of it above.) And you know what? That’s going to be good enough. It didn’t feel good enough to just do it at the top of the file. I want each citation label corrected in case someone is looking at only one document.

It took me less than 10 minutes to make this electronic correction (thanks to the miracle of copying and pasting), substantially less time than option number 1 would have taken. Bonus: I didn’t use up toner or risk the frustration of jammed documents in my scanner. Luckily, this is not a situation I will encounter with any kind of frequency, since I so rarely deal with paper documents.

I try to take these little lessons about “good enough” to heart and pass them along when I can. When does good enough speak to you in your genealogy research?

ETA: In the comments to this post, Kay asked for an example of a placement of the label. As I mentioned in the reply, I usually put it wherever it fits (or on the back of the page). Here’s a full-page view of the label placement.

The scanner that comes with your iPhone

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I recently learned on one of the many terrific Facebook genealogy groups I belong to (I apologize that I don’t remember which one), about a little gem hiding in the iPhone and iPad. I’ve been using an iPhone since I bought a 4S back in 2012 (the same year I started this blog!), but I had never heard about this feature. It’s the scanner feature on the native Notes app.

I don’t use the Notes app much, since I tend to use Evernote to actually keep notes, but I’ve used it off and on over the year. Since I learned about the scanner feature, I’ve using it every time I have a piece of paper I want to capture. I’ve found it easier than using a dedicated scanning app. And it’s handy sometimes that creates a pdf, rather than a jpg.

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you’re in a library or repository and find a document you want to save.

  1. Open the Notes app on your iPhone or iPad.
  2. Press the icon to create a new note.
  3. Touch the icon that looks like a + sign inside a circle.
  4. Touch Scan Documents
  5. Position your phone above the document.

The app will try to locate the edges of the document and take the picture automatically. (It’s like my bank’s app when I’m doing a mobile deposit of a check.) If it can’t find the corners quickly, you can press the round shutter-release icon (like on the camera app) and take the picture and then adjust the corners as necessary. For books that aren’t lying flat, that’s more likely to happen.

For pieces of paper, the photo tends to get taken automatically. It’s really fast and easy–it feels like magic.

Once you have the scan, you can press Save, or you can press the little icon of the picture and then retake it. Once you press Save, you can keep it in your Notes app for processing later or use the Share icon to either email it to yourself or save it in Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive or other apps that might work for you.

On my next research trip, I will give it a try. I think it will save time over just using my phone’s camera, as I did on my Kentucky trip.

One caveat: I understand that in the latest iOS iteration from Apple, the iPad has its own operating system, rather than sharing the iPhone’s. I have not downloaded iOS 13 yet (I like to wait until the kinks are worked out before downloading) and I don’t use an iPad. I’m assuming this feature will exist in the new iOS for the iPhone and the iPad, but I haven’t tried it.

 

Keeping track of learning resources

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve purchased a lot of educational products surrounding genealogy. And I somehow hope I’m not alone when I confess that I have not read/viewed the majority of what I’ve purchased.

A big part of the problem is that the products are typically downloaded and I don’t have a great system for storing them where I’ll find them again. I also don’t have a great memory, so I often forget I’ve even made the purchase.

I decided to try to do something about this. I created a Trello board called G: Learning Resources. (I use the G prefix before all my genealogy-related Trello boards.) Within that board, I created some lists, by topic or source. Then I combed my hard drive for these downloaded documents. I’m not finished yet, but I found a lot in my Genealogy folder. Some were in subfolders, so there was at least an attempt at organization. (I even had one called Learning Resources to Read that I don’t remember creating and haven’t looked at in years.) I created notes for each of the individual resources and attached either the document or a path to the document to each note. For smaller documents, like short pdfs, I attached the document itself to the note in Trello. For resources larger than 10 megabytes (the Trello limit for attachments for the free version), I’ve added the path to the file on my hard drive in the description area of the note.

I’m just getting started but here’s a portion of that Trello board. (You can click on the image to see a larger version.)

Janine's Learning Resources Trello Board

 

And here’s an example of an individual note. It’s for the slide deck from a talk on Ancestry. At the top of this post is another note I created for a webinar that consisted of bunch of different files on different topics.

Now that my resources are together I think I have a fighting chance of actually benefiting from them. A giant find today was the screencast that Diahan Southard had made of a personal consultation we had back in 2015. I knew she’d sent it to me and had tried unsuccessfully to find it on my hard drive last year. (The problem was that it had my name, not hers, in the file name, since she had created it.) So I renamed it, added it to my Trello board and am take great comfort in knowing I’ll be able to find it when I turn my attention back to my DNA research.

Trello allows for Labels (like tags) to be added to individual notes. So when I have more time to spend with it, I’ll think I’ll add some labels, including a “Read” one so I can mark the resources I actually read.

This has been great for corralling my backlog and making it accessible. As a bonus, I think it will help me be more mindful about future purchases. Since I’ll easily be able to see what I already have, I may purchase less (and money). And now I have a place to put those purchases. I can add newly purchased resources to my Learning Resources Trello board and tag them with a “New” or “2019” label so they don’t get lost among the older stuff.

I feel like this will work for me. I’m interested, though, in how you keep track of your learning resources. Please share in the comments!