Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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 #13: Create follow-up notebooks to stay focused

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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 from going down a rabbit hole many times.

Create follow-up notebooks to stay focused

I love playing detective, which is probably why I love genealogy research. So when I’m looking for information online it’s really hard to resist exploring every clue or idea that comes my way in the course of a research session. But if I do follow every lead, I often end up far away from where I intended to go.

That’s where follow-up notebooks come in. I have created follow-up notebooks by surname in Evernote. (This could certainly be accomplished in other platforms, in a tab in a spreadsheet, or on paper.) When I come across a clue or resource that has no bearing on the research question at hand, I just make a new note in the appropriate follow-up notebook. Later, when I’m researching that surname, the note is waiting for me. I don’t have to worry about forgetting it!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

My simple 2021 genealogy goal

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I’m a big goal setter. I set goals for my business, some of which I actually achieve. I set goals for my personal life, too. (Creating a daily yoga habit is one I’ve actually achieved, and I’m working hard on drinking 64 oz of water a day.)

Every year, I set genealogy goals too. And I rarely achieve them. Last year I blogged about my tendency to set up complex goals and I detailed what I thought were achievable goals for 2020. But once again, I didn’t look the goals I’d set. (Despite that, I did pretty well with the ones that involved creating good habits.)

So this year I want to keep it very simple. My word of the year for 2021 is ease and I want that to saturate every aspect of my life. I really would like to do genealogy every day. (And for that reason I’ll probably have six 30 x 30 challenges this year.) In the interest of ease, I’m going to set up a single genealogy goal for the year, one that I can turn to whenever I’m in doubt about what to work on and one on which I can make progress just a few minutes at a time.

My genealogy goal for 2021 is to review all my source citations and source documents. Back in 2016, I exported my sources and created a checklist in Evernote. (I blogged about that here.) In 2018, I added to the list, which now has 834 sources in it. Of those, I’ve checked 86.

So my go-to activity in 2021 will be to make my way through the sources, checking them off as I go. I anticipate learning a lot and making a lot of notes for further follow up. Will I get through all 748 remaining sources? I don’t know. It’s possible.

I actually have 1195 sources now, having added 461 since the last time I updated the checklist. I’d like to think that perhaps those more recent sources don’t need checking since I’ve become a better genealogist. But if I get there and it feels productive, I’ll keep going.

Right now, this sounds like an interesting project. It remains to be seen whether it will stay interesting. In any case, it will be a nice starting point for the year. I like having a single goal so simple that I’ll remember it.

How about you? What are your genealogy goals for 2021?

A small enhancement to my genealogy map

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A small enhancement to my ancestor mapAs I’ve blogged here before, I have an ancestor map hanging on the wall with pins in it for the birth and death/burial places for my direct-line ancestors, up to my third great grandparents. I enjoy looking at it and I love how it makes migration more visible.

I initially started with a map that I pinned over a bulletin board I already had. But that board was bowed. So I put the map onto a thin sheet of cork on top of a piece of foam core, and placed the whole little parfait into a DIY frame. But over time the edges of the map kept pulling out of the frame, so I ended up buying an identical framed map and repinning everything. (So my advice to you if you’re interested in starting a similar project is to cut straight to the pre-framed map.)

The other day I made one tiny enhancement that I wanted to share. The map came with short pushpins with colored heads. On the map, I use longer pins, also with colored heads, so that I can add flags to them indicating the person the pin represents. I took the short pushpins and put them in the areas that I have personally visited for my genealogy research. Primarily that’s cemeteries, though I have spent some time at repositories in Kentucky. Click on the link above to see a larger version of the photos where those shorter pins are more visible.

I was pleased to see that I was able to add four pushpins representing visits to Kentucky, Nebraska, Alabama and western Missouri. I’ve visited graves of ancestors in all four of my lines (Adams, Brown, Rasco and Jeffries). I hadn’t really realized that before this exercise and that makes me feel happy.

The next time I travel to a new place for research, I’ll be delighted to add a pin to the map!