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. This one is about your genealogy research, but it can certainly apply to other areas of your home!

Tidy up your research space before ending the session

If you use paper in your genealogy research, you probably opene file folders or binders during a session and you undoubtedly create some new paper by printing. If you take a few minutes at the end of the session to file those papers in their folders or binders and put them away in their homes, your future self will thank you. When you start your next session with a clear research space, it’s easier to jump right in.

I don’t use paper in my research, but I use the same principle with my digital research. I try hard to process any documents I download during the session. And I file in my folder structure as I go along. Keeping the genealogy folder on my hard drive tidy and organized makes everything easier.

I also try to clear my work desk at the end of every work day to make the next day easier, whether I’m doing genealogy research or working on my business. An uncluttered space contributes to an uncluttered mind!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Here’s the next in my 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) high-impact post every couple of weeks. This one has saved me a lot of time in the past when I’ve let unprocessed files pile up.

Grab a URL when you download a document

When I’m researching mindfully, I process a document as soon as I download it, before I move on to anything else. (And by that I mean create a sort citation, glean all the information from the document and add it to my genealogy software.) But as I revealed in a recent post about my backlog, sometimes the reality is that downloaded documents languish before being processed. (I do always change the filename as soon as I download, though.)

One thing I’ve trained myself to do if I realize I’m not going to have a chance to process a document on the spot is to copy the URL of the document and paste it into the metadata of the file so that I can easily see the document online again. Often I want to look at the context of the document, so I want to look at the website, not just the image I downloaded.

To accomplish this on my MacBook, I copy the URL from the website first. Then, after I’ve renamed the file, I right (or control) click on the filename and select Get Info. (Or, as a reader pointed out to me, I can just click on the filename and press Command+I!) That pulls up the information pane. I simply paste the URL into the Comments section. When I finally get around to processing it, it’s very easy to copy and paste the URL into my browser to see it again.

I think, but I’m not positive, that the same thing is accomplished in Windows by right-clicking on a file, selecting Properties and then clicking on the Details tab. If I’m wrong about that, please correct me in the comments!

Here’s the next in my 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) high-impact post every couple of weeks. This one has become second nature to me, even when I’m not doing genealogy!

Use standard genealogy formatting when writing dates

If you’ve been doing genealogy awhile, you’re probably already doing this, but for newer genealogists, I suggest using a standard date format for your genealogy dates to avoid confusion. Here’s my understanding of the accepted format:

Day of the month expressed in one or two digits, followed by the three-letter abbreviation for the month and then the year, expressed in four digits. (DD MMM YYYY). Note the absence of a comma or slashes.

So my mother’s birthday, which she probably wrote most often as May 2, 1933, is expressed 2 May 1933 in my genealogy software.

Using a standardized format eliminates some of the guess work for people who look at your data. Most U.S. folks are accustomed to writing dates like this: MM-DD-YY (7-10-20). But people in many other countries tend to put the day of the month first, as in DD-MM-YY (10-07-20). Using letters for the month eliminates confusion. And it’s essential to use all four years of the date because we genealogists are working in multiple centuries.

This is an easy habit to get into with repetition. And it’s well worth it, in my opinion!

 

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash