Putting Trello to Work

Do you sometimes hear about a new genealogical tool but just can't seem to adapt it to your workflow? For me, that tool was Trello.

I first heard of Trello on a 'Wacky Wednesday' about Adobe Spark. During that episode, they highlighted an Adobe Spark video by Becky Jamison's: Sharing My Family History on Trello. I likely also watched Cousin Russ' interview with Becky Jamison where she demonstrated her use of Trello. However, I think I missed seeing Hilary Gadsby's blog where she included two videos demonstrating her use of Trello: "Trello, Another Tool for Genealogy".

That was three years ago! I tried tried following Becky's example to create several boards.

This FOSTER board indicates that I was fairly successful in creating a genealogy board. Unfortunately, I did not remember this board and obviously have never used it to assist with my research.

Since I keep hearing from Dear Myrtle about using Trello for planning, I decided to give it another chance. Thus, in June, I did another Google search for Trello and genealogy. One of the posts that caught my attention was Trello Inspiration - How I Use Trello to Organize my Genealogy on A. C. Ivory's Find My Ancestor blog.

Using Ivory's Trello Inspiration as a guide, I started creating a new Trello Board for my 'to do' list. At the time I was wanting to keep track of FamilySearch records that I needed to go to my local library or a Family History Center to access.

This time, I found myself actually using this Trello Board!


Thus, when my husband I had the opportunity to visit the Midwest Genealogy Library for a couple of days, I put Trello to work. Knowing that I wanted to learn more about Crawford descendants in several counties in Missouri and Indiana, I created a stack called 'MidContinent Research Tasks'. Then I created a card for each county with the county name and the associated call number in the title of the card.

With Trello open on my phone, I could quickly glance at the cards and know which section of the library to look for the books for that county.

When I came across a source that I wanted to photocopy information, I created a TO DO card for the source listing the pages I wanted to copy. Again, all of this information went in the TITLE of the card.

With Trello open on my phone, I had all of the info I needed to get the pages copied.

Once finished copying from the source, I changed the TO DO card from 'photocopy' to 'Transcribe' or 'Transcribe - RM'.

As I finished working with a county, the card for that county was moved from the MidContinent stack to the Completed Stack.

When I open one of those 'completed' tasks, the ACTIVITY LOG indicates when I created the card and when I moved it to the COMPLETED stack.

Now that I'm home, I have a long list of transcriptions to do!

I may never go back and use my FOSTER board on Trello. However, I will continue using Trello for my 'To Do' list -- because it fits my workflow!

I will continue to play around with tools suggested by others and am thankful I took a second look at Trello. For now, Trello is my 'to do list' workhorse.

I wonder what other tools are out there needing a second look?