Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Two-part program on Zotero for genealogy starts tomorrow

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Reader Donna Cox Baker is an enthusiastic advocate for using the tool Zotero to organize genealogy research. She wrote a guest post about it for this blog and also described it in her How I Do It interview from 2018.

So I was interested when I received an email yesterday from about a two-part program that Donna is teaching for the Bucks County (Pennsylvania) Genealogy Society (BCGS) called “Zotero for Genealogy: Harnessing the Power of Your Research.” The first part is tomorrow, February 4, from 10 am to 12 pm eastern. The second part will be on March 4. Donna says, “Part I will be about the essential core of Zotero and why genealogists need it. Part II will be about various creative ways I’ve expanded on the Zotero basics to make it a real powerhouse tool–such things as timelines, map legends, ticklers, research planning, thought mapping, and more.”

I still haven’t explored Zotero, so I’m interested in watching her programs. The fee is $10 per workshop for non-members of BCGS and $5 for members. The presentations are being recorded and will be available, to members only, for 30 days. I’m not able to attend live tomorrow, so I elected to join the Bucks County Genealogical Society for only $20 and then I’ll have $5 access to the two workshops (and any future workshops in 2023.) It’s worth it to me to pay an extra $10 for access to the recordings for 30 days.

If you’re interested too, go to this page on the BCGS website to learn about the program and this page to register as a non-member. If you’d rather join first, you can read about membership benefits or skip right to the online membership application form. It’s worth noting that when I joined this morning, I did not instantly gain access to registering for the program at the members’ rate. (I’m waiting for a welcome email with a login.) So if you’re planning to go this route, you might want to join today rather than waiting for tomorrow.

Motivated by a little star

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I’m in the midst of this month’s 30 x 30 challenge, where I’m trying to do 30 minutes of genealogy research a day. I’m also trying to whittle my backlog of unprocessed documents down and to remember to enter my work in my research log each session.

I’ll be posting a mid-month update next week, but today I wanted to tell you about a little tweak I made to my workflow that has proven to be very helpful in getting to me use my research log.

Four or five years ago I created a spreadsheet where I can keep track of my backlog and also log how many minutes I researched. I usually use this spreadsheet during 30 x 30 challenges and I just start a new tab for each challenge. (You can read more about this spreadsheet in my post Keeping track of my backlog busting from a year ago.)

This year I added a column where I place a little star after I log the day’s research. It’s crazy to me how rewarding having that little star is. (You can see it in the close-up above.) It not only provides a visual reminder to log the session log, but it also gives me a little jolt of happiness because I’ve earned a star.

I love it when I can come up with easy way to motivate myself!

 

Keeping genealogy goals attainable

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I’m a big goal setter. Am I a big goal achiever? Not so much when it comes to genealogy goals. Every year I set them (and blog about them) and then I never look at them again. This year, I created a vision board (we recorded a podcast episode about that) and “Little and Often” is part of my vision board, to remind me to work on genealogy frequently.

So this year, in an effort to actually remember and attain my genealogy goals I am making them very simple. Here they are:

  • Research little and often
  • Take one genealogy webinar or class a week
  • Have no documents in my backlog on the last day of every month

Those goals feel attainable and easy to remember. I am going to have a 30 x 30 challenge for the month of January, which will help me stick with the little and often part of it. (Watch for a post about that next week.)

How about you? Do you set genealogy goals? If so, do you achieve them?

 

How do I start going digital?

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A year ago, I posted this article under the name Getting Started Going Digital. I think it’s an important topic, so I decided to run it again today. If you find this topic engaging, I encourage you to click on the link for the original article and look at the comments–reader Marian added interesting insights on approaching an overwhelming pile of papers.

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.