Organization

Have you been following all of the Facebook posts about organizing and tracking your genealogy research? If you haven't then you might want to check out some of these posts:

• The Genealogy Squad - search for 'organizing' posts 
• The Organized Genealogists - check out the files submitted to this group

If you haven't joined these or other genealogy groups on Facebook, then you are missing out on a lot of help!

Because of the recent discussions around organizing one's genealogy, I thought I'd share what I've found useful. Since my genealogy adventure began prior to the Internet, I started with a lot of paper. Thus, I had to have a way to organize it so I could go back and find my notes. As Drew Smith has suggested, I used the SURNAME as my first level of organization. Because I had too much information to fit in one folder for the SURNAME, I subdivided my notes. Below is an example of how those folders were named for one of my surnames:

• Crawford
• Crawford - Letters
• Crawford - Census
• Crawford - Kansas
• Crawford - Indiana
• Crawford - Ohio
• Crawford - Kentucky
• Crawford - Virginia

Buddy File

Do you ever find yourself looking for a picture of an individual in a group and not finding it? Or, do you struggle to find a digital image of a document that someone witnessed?

I know I struggle with this issue. That's why Tony Proctor's presentation regarding indexing off file names during last Monday's session of Monday's with Myrt proved intriguing. (Organizing More Resources)

Tony developed a simple program to attach a 'buddy file' to the image. As he was presenting, I kept thinking, about the time involved to add this information to each and every photograph.

Then, Hilary commented that she has been using Tony's program to attach transcriptions to a digital image. With the transcription attached to the image, I would be able to search my files for a member of an ancestor's FAN club and find records they were mentioned in. That makes it worth the time to learn how to do this.