Leaving the Past to the Future 1: Organizing Your Information

I often read blog posts and articles about organizing genealogical information. Much of it is written to help family researchers keep track of their own work on the multiple families and individuals whose history they seek to unravel. It does not take long to find thousands of people for whom simple curiosity ends up with enormous amounts of data and documents.

My own Legacy 9.0 Family Tree file currently has over 9,600 individuals in over 2,900 families. The most important ones to me, of course, are those in the direct ancestral lines of me and my wife. And those are, arguably, where I spend most of my time when I am actively looking for more information.

There actually used to be more people in my tree but somewhere along the line, during one of my software updates I think, I lost data that I know that I had added. I still have all the information; it just is not all on the Legacy tree. So, every once in a while, I run across a family that is not up-to-date and have to go into my files and input it again to Legacy.

I am past the point of just adding names to flesh out all the families, although that does still occur as I discover more documents relative to our families’ history. As you progress through the research it does get harder to find additional family members as they can be hidden in obscure records or further back in time which can mean records were not preserved.

Most of what I do now with family research focuses on assembling stories about people and their activities. That also involves learning more about natural events that may have impacted lives and livelihoods, which has certainly been influenced by my professional life as an Earth Scientist.

Many of those blogs and articles about organizing family history files are also about what to do with it when we are gone. But I digress…

I am reasonably well organized.

In the main Genealogy folder on my hard drive (backed up on the cloud, too) I have over 126,000 files in over 6,400 folders. That includes not only the individual family folders but also information about courses, societies, publications, consulting projects, and a myriad of other related subjects. All the files and subfolders used to be in one super-folder but having everything together got cumbersome and hard to deal with.

I reorganized my genealogy-related information a few years ago into specific categories:

·         Family Files – contains all the specific information about my ancestral families, including family trees, plus family photos, and information about DNA, heirlooms and memorabilia (55.5 GB; 39,297 files). Each family line has a folder. Within that main folder are other individual folders for each family.

·         General Information & Sources – has information about courses, consulting projects, maps, record offices, societies and software (61.4 GB; 29,711 files)

·         Presentations & Publications – has information about my blogs, books, presentations and published articles (80.9 GB; 44,766 files)

·         Regions – has information about the various regions in which my ancestral families lived (35.0 GB; 19,410 files) including area descriptions, histories, maps and photos

The most important information, of course, is in the Family Files folder which contains the results of almost all my ancestor research. Also of great value is the folder that contains all my written work and presentation material. This is information I would want to preserve and pass down to my descendants. The other folders have data that would be valuable to anyone who wanted to continue work on our families.

I also maintain binders of printed material that, to me at least, is irreplaceable. This includes photo albums; birth, marriage, and death certificates; important individual and family documents that represent events and achievements, and books and other publications that are about or contain references to family members. The documents are generally compiled and stored by family line.

And I have a collection of physical memorabilia, much of it handed down over several generations: cameras, farm implements, films, photos (obviously), toys, bibles, antiques, business paraphernalia, souvenirs of past vacations, jewelry, etc., etc., etc.

So, what are the best ways to make sure your genealogy is safe, all important family information is preserved and be in a form or format that others, including your descendants, will be interested in taking over – or at least want to keep for future generations to peruse. And that includes both digital and hard copies.

Here are some of the blog posts I have written about various aspects of storing and organizing family information and memorabilia for future reference and access:

·         What will we do with future photos? https://discovergenealogy.blogspot.com/2016/04/what-will-we-do-with-future-photos.html

·         Memorabilia https://discovergenealogy.blogspot.com/2016/05/memorabilia.html

·         Digitizing Memories https://discovergenealogy.blogspot.com/2017/03/digitizing-memories.html

·         You Can’t Keep Everything https://discovergenealogy.blogspot.com/2017/05/you-cant-keep-everything.html

·         Organizing and Storing Your Family History Data – My Thoughts https://discovergenealogy.blogspot.com/2017/09/organizing-and-storing-your-family.html

·         My Amazing Picture-Taking Machines https://discovergenealogy.blogspot.com/2019/10/my-amazing-picture-taking-machines.html

In future blog posts I will update the ideas with information I have found in my more recent work.

For today, here are some helpful websites and articles to peruse:

·         Denis May Levenick https://thefamilycurator.com/four-tried-and-true-systems-for-organizing-genealogy-researc/

·         James Tanner: I have a huge pile of genealogy stuff, what do I do with it? https://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/search/label/Organization

·         Lisa S. Gorrell – My Trails into the Past (Organized: How I Hope to Leave My Genealogy to My Heirs): http://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2022/10/organized-how-i-hope-to-leave-my.html

·         FamilySearch: What to do with the genealogy and family history I collected https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/What_to_do_with_the_genealogy_and_family_history_I_collected

·         Legacy News: How will you pass down your memories? https://news.legacyfamilytree.com/legacy_news/2019/07/how-will-you-pass-down-your-memories.html

·         Library of Congress (US): https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2014/01/write-your-family-history-and-send-it-to-the-library-of-congress/