Organizing Your Research - Part 4

Today as I was taking a walk in the woods near Cowan Lake in Clinton Co., OH, I ran across an old cemetery.  It was in pretty bad shape but I was able to find a way in and took photos of a lot of the headstones because I like to upload those if I find no one has done so yet.  Well, imagine my surprise when I ran across one of the CASTO families that I have been researching for many years.  Then I ran across some CAST tombstones and that immediately told me which line this was because there was a CAST-CASTO marriage in 1824 and I had obviously stumbled across their territory.  Thank goodness I have my files organized at home and was able to immediately put the tombstones photos with the right names in my database and use the photos as another source for my information.  I just couldn't believe that I ran across these Castos in the woods like that because the name is very rare in these parts.  There are none in Warren County where I live, nor neighboring Butler, Hamilton, or Clermont County.  But here I found two Castos who had died in 1835 & 1840 while I was looking for pretty scenery to shoot!  My Lucky Day!

Now, let’s talk about those computer files. I bet there are many people here who have almost as many downloaded census records, photos, cemetery lists, and emails as us “old-timers” have paper files and printed pages. How do you keep them all organized on your computer? That is a little trickier because it depends a lot on how well you know how to use your computer and your genealogy program, if you even use one. When I am teaching new computer users how to save documents, I show them how to create a folder on their desktop and then download or copy files to it. While I was giving my presentation the other night, one person pointed out that is sometimes hard to do for newbies but if I am right there with them, it's much easier to teach.  Once you’ve mastered that, it works very much the same as if you were putting the documents in a real filing cabinet. One of the greatest advantages to having computer files is the ease is which you can search for them. It helps if you have developed a naming system that works with how you think of things – my census records always start YEAR – NAME - PLACE. That way I can look into the “John Casto Family Folder” to see immediately how many census records I have, plus scanned images of bible records, wills, cemetery photos, etc. I have found that my genealogy program can import and attach these same images but boy, does it add to the size of the file. And when I create a gedcom, it makes it too large for some people to import or download. As you organize your electronic files, you may be inspired to use a similar method on your paper files!

There will be one more blog on Organizing and then on to a new subject - please feel free to leave comments if there is something you would like me to address.