Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

New Orderly Roots Guide on the way: How I Do It

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I’m putting the finishing touches on a new Orderly Roots guide! It’s called How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow and it explains, in some detail, how I go about organizing my own genealogy research. I’m never one to tell someone that there’s one right way to organize anything. But I have been honing an organizing process for a few years that works really well for me.

Instead of writing a guide suggesting all the various ways you might organize your research, I decided to write one detailing how I organize mine, in the hopes that it will be a jumping-off point for you.

I’m excited that it’s almost completed and I hope to publish it by the end of the year. Right now it’s over 30 pages long and it might get a little longer. Please keep an eye out for the announcement that it is available!

Check out Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box

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Back in April, I wrote an enthusiastic blog post about my favorite RootsTech 2020 presentation, Do Something with That Box from Stacy Julian. She kindly gave me permission to reprint her helpful handout because she hadn’t written about it on her own website.

I was delighted to see that last month she published a robust blog post on the topic that fleshes out what I wrote about. It’s called How to BEGIN with the Box and I urge you to check it out, even if you’ve read my post. It provides great detail and it includes the downloadable pdf of the handout, along with photos and explanations.

When I drove to Walla Walla in September, I took the opportunity to bring home a box of family stuff. It’s not so much documents as photos, but I intend to use Stacy’s framework as I go through it. (The box been sitting unopened for almost six weeks now…I think our stay-at-home holiday time will be a good time to address it.)

If you have a box of family memorabilia to go through, do yourself a favor and check out her terrific post. You can thank me (well, really, Stacy) later.

Amy Johnson Crow’s WANDER method for genealogy

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If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m a fan of Amy Johnson Crow. She was one of my first How They Do It interviewees. She’s interviewed me for her podcast a couple of times. She’s one of my favorite genealogy speakers. And we like hanging out at conferences.

When I read her first blog post/podcast episode about her WANDER method, her description of the genealogy research process, I was really impressed. First of all, coming up with a viable acronym isn’t easy. And it so succinctly describes a really smart way to think about the research process.

WANDER means:

Amy creates a blog post from each episode of her podcast, so you have two ways to consume her information. You can read about it or listen to it. (These links give you access to both media.) She first described the WANDER method in this post, called The Genealogy Research Process: The WANDER Method, which provides a general overview. And then she goes in-depth into each step in subsequent posts/episodes. I’ve linked to those episodes above, in the bullet points. As of this writing, Evaluate Everything is her most recent post. I couldn’t wait for the final one before writing about it here!

I encourage you to read and/or listen to these posts/episodes for inspiration for doing some solid research. (She offers a printable method to remember the steps on the overview post!)

Favorite RootsTech session: Do Something with that Box!

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Stacy Julian

I heard a lot of great sessions at RootsTech this year. But the one that really blew me away–because of the quality of its content and presentation–was Stacy Julian’s Do Something with that Box! Stacy is a blogger and podcaster and superstar in the scrapbooking world. You can learn more about her at www.stacyjulian.com.

“That box” that Stacy refers to is the box of family history papers, photos, ephemera and (sometimes) junk that so many of us have been given. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by that box, isn’t it? In her talk, Stacy took us step by step through her methodology to make the stuff inside that box accessible “so that when you want to find something you can and when you have time to take action you know what to do.” As a professional organizer, this made my heart sing.

One of the things I loved about her approach is that it makes the process of dealing with a box of family-history stuff less overwhelming. Stacy has you sort everything into one of five broad categories, then go through each category and assess the value of each item. You’ll be discarding lots of stuff during this process, undoubtedly. Stacy makes the point that scarcity creates value–if you are discerning about what you keep, your family members are more likely to look at and enjoy the items.

After sorting and assessing you’ll assign an action to each item that requires one (digitize, transcribe, share, etc), using a sticky note. The final step is to file the stuff into a file box using the same broad categories you started with. As you go through the documents, you’ll put those that excited you into an Action folder. Once you have ten items in the Action folder, you take action.  An optional step in the process is to create a timeline, as you go, for each generation of the family represented by the box.

The system gets you to a “good enough” place where your stuff is easily accessed–by you or other family members–without expending a huge amount of effort. And when you have an itch to take action, you’ll know just what to do. Genius.

Stacy was kind enough to give me permission to make the handout that she gave to RootsTech participants available to you. At the bottom of this post are images of each of the five pages. Click on each to see a larger version.

The handout is great because it gives you the bones of her fantastic method. Hearing her speak about it was even better–there were videos included in her presentation and her energetic style was so enjoyable (and effective).

I have some great news: Stacy is developing an online course on this topic! So you’ll be able to get all the great content those of us in her RootsTech audience experienced (and probably more). I’ll be sure and post when that’s available.

In the meantime, take a look at this handout and see whether you might be able to take some steps to tackle one of your boxes while you’ve got extra time at home.

Edited to add: I was delighted to discover that Stacy has now written a robust blog post on this topic! Check out How to BEGIN with the BOX on her website.