Downsizing and Regorganizing

Happy New Year!

I'm sure there are many genealogists out there who pledged to organize their genealogy as part of their New Year's resolutions. I'm one of them...sort of.

Last year we invited my mother to move in with us and we are still in that process. Many things have thrown my original schedule for the move off course, but we finally have an end in sight. My mother's bedroom will be the room that has been my genealogy office for several years now, so my genealogy and family history photos, notes, albums, etc. have been spread around our place in (interior) closets, bookshelves, desk drawers, anywhere it can be safely stored.

Of course, one of the best ways to save space is to digitize things that can be thrown away, things like handouts and syllabi from in-person lectures. I have a stack of about a dozen of these, so it isn't a huge project and I'm able to check these off of my list pretty easily a few at at time without having a huge stack on my desk. Ideally, I should have done this after each lecture, but, well, you know!

Since my scanner is still packed away somewhere waiting for me to decide on a new permanent home, I had to come up with a different way to save these notes. I could have put them aside, but I was getting sick of "To Deal with Later" piles, so I decided to use my phone, Google Photos and Evernote. The added bonus of using Evernote is that once the photos are uploaded, the text in my images becomes searchable, so these lecture notes will come up in any relevant search I do. This is such a great feature that even when I come across notes from a virtual presentation that I have already saved on my desktop as a pdf or Word document, I upload that to Evernote as well. Now those files are searchable by more than their document name and I have an additional backup copy of the notes as a bonus.

Here's the simple process:

1. Take a photo of each page. It doesn't have to be perfectly centered, just legible.

2. While the photos are syncing to Google Photos, start a new note in Evernote. I give it the name of the lecture and then create tags: Lecture Notes, the name of the group that sponsored the lecture, lecturers name, subject, geographical location if relevant; basically, any word or phrase that you decide will be helpful in the future.

3. Once the photos are available in Google photos, I right click over and copy each image in order and then paste each one into that note in Evernote.

4. Download the photos to my desktop computer for another backup, usually in a folder for whoever sponsored the lecture.

5. Toss the original in the trash!

Whatever your genealogy goals for 2023, I hope you achieve them all. And, as always, I hope to be back soon.