Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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

Quick Tip #23: One source is not enough

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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 is an important reminder that our genealogy research is a marathon, not a sprint.

One source is not enough

When you find a document that allows you to add someone to your tree or fills in a blank, remember that your search isn’t over. It’s always a good idea to try to find multiple sources for each fact. If you do that, your tree’s trunk and branches will be stronger and you’ll have more confidence in your research. Basing your research on a single fact can lead to wasted effort and a big clean-up project down the road.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Quick Tip #22: Don’t rely on online trees

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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 is one that I think trips up new genealogists quite often!

Don’t rely on online trees

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with online genealogy research, in my view. It’s how I do most of my research, in fact. Websites like Family Search and Ancestry provide amazing, reliable information and the hunt for images of original documents is thrilling.

The problem comes when people take information found on public trees on those sites and assume the information is accurate. A tree is only as good as the genealogist who put it together. And unfortunately if someone has posted wrong information it’s often copied and may appear in many other trees. That can give it a patina of reliability. But unless it’s backed up by a solid source, I suggest using it only as a clue.

You’ll avoid heartache and headache down the road if you rely on solid source documents, not family trees, for your research.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Quick Tip #21: Ignore nothing

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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. I often find myself glad that I’ve paid attention to a small detail!

Ignore nothing

I’ve been doing my share of newspaper research lately. (I treated myself to a six-month subscription to Publisher Extra on newspapers.com recently.) When I do a newspaper search on my relatives I often unearth tiny mentions of them that seem unimportant and not worth the time to download and process.

I’ve learned that these small mentions can be important additions my research and that I shouldn’t ignore them. Case in point: I downloaded an article from the Owensburg Owensboro (Kentucky) Messenger-Inquirer from 16 Jun 1903 that offered a single sentence about my great grandfather: “Mr. Elmer Adams’ horse ran off Sunday morning and tore his buggy all to pieces.” (It was part of a larger article full of single-sentence updates about residents of Sacramento, McLean, Kentucky including a mention of Elmer’s mother’s funeral.)

I’m so glad I downloaded it because later, when I was trying to figure out when Elmer moved his family from Kentucky to Oregon where my grandfather was born in 1904, this became a data point on my timeline. It helped me narrow down when he might have left Kentucky.

Now I remind myself to go ahead and take a few minutes to download each piece of information I find (in a newspaper or elsewhere), no matter how trivial it may seem at that moment. It just might come in handy later!