I have been working on family history (or genealogy) for the past few years. I have become quite good at being able to find records and am piecing together the lives of many of my (and my husband's) ancestors. This is all good. My big problem is Organization.
I have been collecting records and "trying" to put them in their proper places, so that I can find them again. However, some of the time I am working on my desktop and some of the time on my laptop. Only at my desktop do I have a big, secondary hard drive where I have a file for each generation and each family in that generation. When I am working on my laptop, usually at night, while watching TV, I do download the files and label them appropriately. But I don't often find the time to MOVE them from my laptop to their proper filing folder on my desktop. I would much rather be hunting down new material.
The other thing that I am trying to do is to write a story about each family group. I collect the birth, marriage, and death files. I find newspaper articles and census records, property records and wills. I look at my ancestor's siblings and their families and I try to get a sense about what these family groups were going through while they lived. This is much harder than it sounds. But it IS my ultimate goal, to leave a record of these families that my husband and I come from and to tell their stories for future generations. But there are SO MANY OF THEM!
For any interested party, the filing system that I use is this. I create a file for each direct ancestral couple. I use the first 4 letters of their last names in this system, in order to keep the file names an appropriate size. My husband and I are Gen 1, our parents are Gen 2, etc. So a file for our grandparents would look like this:
03_SMIT John_JONE Mary
That would be the file that would start with their marriage and go on with each child having their own sub-folder in their birth order: 1_Thomas, 2_Joan, 3_Clara etc. In those files I would put all their BMD records and information on their children, censuses they are in, etc. When my own direct ancestor marries, they get thier own couple file. This works pretty well for me. My ancestors had lots and lots of kids. My husband's family, less so.
Each record gets labeled like this: SMITH JOHN 1896 BIRTH or SMITH JOHN JONES MARY 1913 MARRIAGE
Doing this also makes it easy to find a record, as I can spot the year I am looking for, and what person or persons are involved in the record.
Okay, enough explaining. Time to do some record sorting....
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