Organizing Genealogy Files

Years ago, I used to walk cemeteries and take pictures, of over a dozen cemeteries.  I had over 5,000 photographs saved on my computer.  What made matters worse is when I researched at the local museum they had anywhere from 2-12 obits copied on each page.  Got this is there were indexes of their twenty something books (A book per letter or more of the alphabet)  So when I copied a page I cropped them and saved them all on my computer over 3,500  knowing someday they would enter the 20^th century and put them on their hard drive.

So in those days I would save them in the following format:

Lastname.Firstname.Middlename

I used the periods to let the computer keep the alphabetized.  That was fine for a folder on Obits and Tombstones.

Oh let me regress back to the museum.  Only paper I keep in my genealogy is family sheets and my family tree.  You ask why?  The answer is one day someone donated their grandmother’s genealogy work to the museum’s library.  They brought in 11 large boxes.  Another volunteer and I sorted and sorted and found dozens of the same sheets, by the time we were finished it we got I down to one box out of eleven. 

That was it for me no more paper.  My trees live safely on ancestry and my website.  My main tree is large.  It contains my family, my late husbands, one of his sister in laws, a few cousins I work with on my father’s line, a few more cousins lines of my late husband who are working with me on his maternal grandmother’s line. I add in-law and their parents and have my late husband’s step-dad line also for his half-brothers back to Scotland.

When you start doing genealogy there are so many pictures, documents and files you can end up with up to a hundred items per person.  I found the need for more creative filing, all those years majoring in business and work taught me a few things (or I want to think so)

Beginning you can start saving files on your computer, but it will start to slow you down, so at some point think of storing on ‘the cloud’ there are some free ones out there.  Personal hard drives are nice but my 30+ geek daughter fried hers then mine with 20 years of our family photos I had fixed and saved.  Nothing is fail safe!

I tend to store all my files online on my family website and Ancestry.com.  I also save mine to the ‘Cloud’. 

Now how I do my files:

•        Ancestry
•                Artwork
•     (For non-family photos I use a lot of generational types to tell me at a glance in a tree online which line they are.  One color my line direct, one for my husband, etc. (I actually share lines with my husband and cousins, so you can get confused)
•       Family
•           Hicks 
•      (Now here is my big trick for multiple direct lines with the same last name, using the numbers sorts your tree automatically)
•           01-My Dad Name
•          Children
•         Children with Wife A, etc... 
•     In-laws (If not enough in-laws for a major file put them here.)
•          02-His Father
•           Children
•     Children with Wife A, etc…
•     In-laws (If not enough in-laws for a major file put them here)
•          03-His Grandfather

•    Mullins
•    I have several Miscellaneous Files
•    My Name (Personal Files)

With a little effort your files will be organized. 

Remember:

1.  Direct line stays out of their parents file.
2.  I put wives in their husbands file, Always, keep her name as HER MAIDEN NAME, REGARDLESS!
3.   Children that have been adopted . If don’t know the name use: (Adopted Father’s Last Name). Works well with the wife you don’t know also (Husband’s Last Name).  In all my older LDS families the husband gave his new wives children his name.  Try straightening out over 100 children knowing that fact, marriage dates will help usually in that case.

Hope this helps, if you get confused, leave a message.  We all get confused, I got lost today tracking 15 generations of connected Mayflower Families today.

Happy searches and many discoveries!