Organizing Your Research

I have been asked recently about how to organize 30 years of genealogy research.  I am going to share some simple thoughts and will be expanding on it over the next few posts and turn it into another presentation on Ancestorville Genealogy on Facebook.

Because this researcher has so much material, it is easy to feel overwhelmed or not know where to start. It is important to come up with even a vague plan of what you would like to accomplish and how you need to get there. Plan it out in small tasks and don’t think, “I’m going to get 30 years of paperwork organized in one day!”

Personally, I started out by putting all my certificates in one 3-ring binder with archival quality paper protectors. In this day and age, it doesn’t hurt to make a scanned copy (if you have a scanner) so you have a digital version which you can add to your database, send to other researchers who are looking for source material, etc.

Then I broke the family research into binders as well – thank goodness those page protectors are cheap because you will buy them by the 100’s but it’s worth it to have it all organized. You can sort you research by family, location, or record type – census records, cemetery lists and photos, etc.

Ask yourself some questions:

1. What am I looking for the most that I can’t find?

2. Ideally, I would like to have what piece of information most readily available?

3. If I scanned all my pages and then boxed up the originals, would I be able to find the digital versions any easier than the hard copies?

4. With census records readily available and easy to replace and the data transcribed and put into the notes of your genealogy database, do you really still need to keep the hardcopies? Would a scanned version be sufficient and then pitch the hard copy? That’s a lot of scanning though. Ask yourself – if these pages have been in a stack for 30 years and not looked at (or found) then do I really need the hard copy?

 More later...