Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Keeping track of my backlog busting

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One of my primary goals in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge is to get rid of the formidable backlog of documents to be processed that I had let pile up. I had a backlog of 88 files that I had not processed. I disappoint myself when I do that. But I’m bound and determined to get caught up this month.

To help keep me motivated, I created a little spreadsheet as I’ve done in the past. Here’s what it looks like:

I started January with 77 backlogged files because I was able to reduce the number from 88 in late December. Here are a few things I like about this spreadsheet:

  • I can highlight the Amount of Time Worked column and see the total number of minutes for the month and average number of minutes worked per day. (Right now, I’m at 3 hours of work and an average of 32 minutes a day.)
  • Entering the numbers and watching the # remaining column go down is very motivating to me!
  • If I have to do a little research that results in my downloading documents in order to process a document, this spreadsheet takes that into account. I want to have a net reduction each session!

I do this in Numbers on my Mac, but it could easily be done in Excel or Google Sheets. I’ve also been keeping track of the types of documents I’m processing my informal Evernote research log.

I hope you find this a little bit helpful and that your 30 x 30 challenge is going as well as mine!

 

Getting started going digital

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If you’ve been pondering transitioning to digital organization of your genealogy records, you may be stymied about how to get started. It can feel overwhelming and perfectionism might be paralyzing you.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I’m almost completely paperless in my genealogy research. I started out printing and filing everything but transitioned over a few years to digital. I didn’t make a decision to go paperless on a certain date. Rather, once I had a trustworthy digital folder structure and file-naming protocol in place, I didn’t feel like I needed to print anything out. I’m lucky, in a way. I came to this after just a couple of years of serious research. So I didn’t have a huge backlog to contend with.

I get a good number of questions from folks who have been researching for years and have a whole of lot paper to show for it. They want to go digital but don’t know where to start digitizing their research. If that’s something you think about, here’s a post designed to help you get started.

Here’s what I recommend as the first steps to organizing your genealogy research digitally.

  1. Create a folder structure and a file-naming protocol. This is critical so you easily find your documents. I describe my folder structure and file-naming protocol in step six of this blog post.
  2. From this point forward, stop printing and start downloading documents you find online, using your new folder structure and file-naming protocol. If you start now, you’ll familiarize yourself with your the new file system and you won’t add to your backlog of documents to be scanned and filed.
  3. Start scanning, renaming and filing your paper documents. What I did was go through my paper file folders, which were organized by couple, one by one, evaluating each piece of paper and scanning documents any that I didn’t already have in electronic form. I blogged about it in a post called Marrying my electronic and paper files. This may sound tedious, but I urge you to think about this as an opportunity to check your research. Looking at each paper, you may come across evidence that you overlooked when you first filed those papers. Here’s the good news: you don’t have to take a vacation to get it done. You can do it little by little, person by person or couple by couple (depending on how your paper documents are organized).
  4. Recycle or shred paper after you scan it. I see no reason to hang onto the paper files you have scanned, unless they have some historical value. For example, after I carefully scanned it, I kept the epic handwritten letter my grandfather wrote my grandmother before they married.
  5. If you find yourself pulling a paper document out of your files to help you in your current research, go ahead and scan and file it electronically. Then toss the paper.
  6. It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. If you’re organizing your genealogy research digitally it’s imperative that you have a routine in place for backing up your hard drive. (Look no further than my recent experience of my backup saving my bacon when my computer died without warning.) It’s a good idea to have more than one back up.

This process reminds me of that age-old question: “How do you eat an elephant?” One bite at a time. Once you get your folder structure and file-naming protocol set up, you just take it paper by paper. Acknowledge that it will take awhile. Recognize the value of going through your old papers. And keep your eye on the prize: An easily accessible, readable and sharable archive of your genealogy records.

For detailed information on the digital organizing system I created for my research, check out my 2021 Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow. The downloadable pdf is 37 pages and available for $19.99.

Photo by Tom Woodward via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Back up to the rescue!

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I’ve blogged before about the importance of backing up your data. Since I organize all my genealogy files (as well as almost all of my business and personal files) digitally, a back up is essential. In this post from earlier this year, I detailed how I back up my hard drive to the cloud and to an external hard drive.

My back up was put to the test last Friday when my MacBook Pro stopped working. While I was using it, it turned itself off and refused to come back on. I called AppleCare (thankfully, it’s still under warranty) then went to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store where they spent two fruitless hours trying to revive it. So now it’s on its way to the Apple repair shop. Unless I decide to purchase a new MacBook with the intention of returning it (something I might end up doing), I will be without a computer for at least a week.

My husband has an iPad Pro that he’s letting me use. It has a keyboard case and I can also connect my Bluetooth mouse to it. I’m grateful for that, but the iPad has limitations. The whole thing is a hassle. But it’s nothing like the panic I would be experiencing if I did not have an automatic backup routine in place.

Since I back up to the cloud via BackBlaze, I am able to cherry pick files to download to the iPad. So I’m able to use key spreadsheets and documents to keep my business going. I have Reunion Touch on my iPhone so I can easily access my genealogy database and source documents. (The truth is that I’m not doing much research, though. Since everything else is taking me so much time to do I have no spare time.)

My backup routine has turned a potential calamity into an inconvenience. If you’re not backing up regularly, I hope this cautionary tale is enough to get you to start!

Edited to add: I received my computer back from Apple on Thursday (only two days after I originally wrote this post). The logic board was replaced and an updated operating system installed, which meant that I had to restore all files from my back up. My Time Machine back up on my external hard drive made that so easy. I was able to initiate the transfer of those files with one click and they were installed overnight. I was happily surprised to learn that the back up had been updated during the hour that my computer was plugged into the hard drive before it crashed. So I had an up-to-date backup.

My takeaway: Having both the Time Machine back up on an external hard drive and a cloud backup on BackBlaze is what allowed me to weather this situation without too much trauma or inconvenience.

Photo by Dallas Reedy on Unsplash

 

Quick Tip #24: Keep your folder structure simple

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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 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