Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Tiny organizing projects

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Time to empty that To File file!For many people, this is a five-day weekend. A glorious expanse of time that might include some family history research. While doing your research is certainly important, I encourage you this weekend to also spend a little time organizing it.

I’m not suggesting that you pull everything out and try to organize it all. If you do that, you risk not finishing and ending up with a bigger mess than when you started.

Rather, I’m suggesting you take a look at your genealogy space and/or records and visualize some little projects. Do you have a group of photos you can organize? Some filing you can do? Some order to create on your hard drive? Maybe you need to create a research plan or put together a comprehensive to-do list.

My point here is that when it comes to organizing your family history, you probably have a whole series of tiny organizing projects you can do a little at a time. If you spend 30 minutes each day this weekend (and perhaps every weekend), you could get a surprisingly large amount of organizing done.

Take a look around and spot a small project. Write it down and look for another. Do this a few times and you have a great (hopefully not overwhelming) organizing task list.

I’ll be doing the same this weekend. Happy organizing!

Direct vs collateral lines

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Keeping track of ancestors' siblings can provide valuable genealogy clues.

My grandfather, Crawford Brown, with his parents and siblings, 1916

So far in my family history research, I’ve focused on direct lines. Except for my own brothers, every person entered into my genealogy software (I use Reunion) is someone I’m directly descended from. I think one of the reasons for that is to try to make genealogy research less overwhelming. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how useful it would be to record brothers and sisters of direct ancestors (i.e. collateral lines). They can give valuable clues and help verify that a person being reached is the right person.

I worry a little about where I should draw the line–if I record the children of the siblings of my direct ancestors, will my family tree feel bloated? Will I feel more overwhelmed?

This came to a head this week when I learned that my grandfather’s only surviving sibling, his sister Mary, passed away at the age of 99. I was fortunate to meet Mary for the first time earlier this year. (That’s Mary, on her father’s lap at the age of four in the photo. My grandfather, Crawford, is standing at his father’s left shoulder.) She was delightful, with sparkling eyes and an easy laugh. I’m saddened by her passing.

Somehow it feels wrong that Mary’s not included in my family tree entries. I’ve decided to record siblings of my direct line as I come across them. My mother’s cousins Jerry and Judy Brown (Aunt Mary’s nephew and niece) have done a lot of genealogy research–including oral history with Mary–so adding that part of the family will be easy. I don’t know that I’ll go out of my way to research collateral lines (though who knows?), but I intend to verify and record information as I encounter it.

It seems clear to me that I shouldn’t be afraid of having too much information, as long as I apply the same standards of accuracy to my collateral lines as I do my direct lines. I don’t mind recording information–in fact, I rather enjoy it. So I’m comfortable with my decision to start including collateral lines. I’ll try not to let it overwhelm me!

For more in-depth information on how I organize my own genealogy, including my collateral lines, check out  How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow, a 37-page downloadable pdf published in 2021 and available for $19.99.

My dream genealogy staycation

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I’ve been very busy helping clients get organized recently and just have not taken the time to do genealogy research. I’ve been out all day most days and when I come home it’s all I can do to wrangle my email and get ready for the next day before collapsing with a glass of wine. (Well, it’s not quite that dramatic, but you get the idea.)

I find myself fantasizing about taking an entire week off to spend on doing genealogy research. In this dream stay-cation, I’d probably do the following:

That sounds like more than a week’s worth of activities, actually. But the truth is that the chances I would actually take a week away from clients and running my organizing business is pretty remote.

But you know what? I don’t need a week off to dig into this stuff. Heck, I don’t need an afternoon off. If I can capture an hour here or there, I’ll make progress.  And if I managed to put in 30 minutes most days, I’d make huge progress. It’s just like I tell my clients about decluttering: 15 or 30 minutes a day can make all the difference in the world. In fact, I got out my calculator and figured it out. If you declutter (or do family history research) for 3o minutes a day, five days a week, for a year , it comes to 130 hours. That’s more than three work weeks!

I still love the idea of focusing my efforts for an entire week. But for now, I’ll try to wedge about a half hour a day in and see what progress I can make!

Tracking progress

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My memory is not what it used to be. And I’m finding the more family history research I do, the more I’m duplicating effort. In the process of researching one person, another person will pop into my mind. I’ll look for a record for that person, rejoice in finding it, then realize I’d already found it!

So in an effort to avoid that, as well help me in my never-ending quest to not feel overwhelmed about my genealogy research, this past weekend I created a series of progress-tracking spreadsheets. I was inspired by Miriam’s Census Spreadsheet, which is a Google Doc. I’m a Mac user and I used the Numbers program (similar to Excel) to create three spreadsheets (so far) that track progress, by ancestor, on finding the following records:

Sheet 1: BMD

  1. birth records
  2. marriage records
  3. death records
  4. burial records
  5. grave photos

Sheet 2: Censuses

On the first table (pictured above) I have a row for each ancestor (this is a work in progress…I’ve been adding info a generation at a time and up to my great-great grandparents), and a column for each U.S. Census. I fill in the square in blue if that record was found. A grey square indicates the ancestor wasn’t alive for that census. A blank (white) square indicates I still need to find this record. I also have a table of state censuses, so I can note those.

Sheet 3: Military

Here I track what military records I’ve found for each ancestor, by war or conflict. This one’s definitely a work in progress.

Going through this process helped me realize how much census work I’d done and how much more work I had to do to find birth, marriage and death records. I think these charts will help me feel a sense of accomplishment and also help me hone in on work that needs to be done. I’ll keep adding ancestors from Reunion, until I’m caught up, and then plan to keep up with the spreadsheet as I find more records.

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When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.