Saturday, May 9, 2009

Ongoing Genealogy Organization

Since the dial-up internet at my house is as fast as an arthritic turtle on crutches; I am at my oldest son's and he has dsl; so I can actually post.
On the other hand, not being able to get online has helped with real life. My house is clean all the time.
I have been doing some major genealogy organizing lately. I have discovered that some of my old files haven't been touched since 1996-1999. Doesn't seem possible that it has been that long.
What I Have Accomplished
1. Have located all genealogy papers and notebooks.
2. Cleaned off 2 rows on the bookshelf and have all the genealogy research notebooks arranged on there.
3. Gathered all genealogy files on my computer and moved them all to a folder named "Genealogy".
4. Gathered all loose genealogy papers and sorted them by family name.
5. Took all sorted genealogy papers and placed them in plastic page protectors and stuck them in proper surname binder. At this point I simply want them in the right binder; I am not trying to deal with them another further than that. So I stick multiple papers in each page protector.
6. On the computer I opened the Genealogy folder and made a subfolder for each surname that I am researching plus a subfolder titled "Organization". Then I moved each file into the appropriate subfolder. On a side note, some of these files have not been accessed since 1996-1999.
7. Now that the files are organized and the notebooks in place; when I have a few minutes to work on the genealogy; I either open a file and work on entering the information from the file into my genealogy database program or pick a paper and enter that information.
Ongoing Plans for my Genealogy
1. Eventually, all the random papers in the page protectors in the genealogy research binders need to be entered into the genealogy database program.
2. All the information in the random genealogy files in the Genealogy folder and subfolders needs to be entered into the genealogy database program.
3. Once all this hard, boring, and tedious paperwork and files are organized and entered into the genealogy database program then I can get back to the fun part which is the research and actually finding the missing pieces.
Inspiration and Guidance
Dear Myrt genealogy column has a monthly genealogical organizational advice post that is most helpful to getting your genealogical life / business in order. Just google Dear Myrt + genealogy; and I am sure that you will find her most helpful.

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