Book Review - Planning a Future for Your Family's Past by Marian Burk Wood

Disclaimer: Marian Burk Wood asked me to review her book and provided me with a free copy.

Slide and document storage.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that I have been blessed with a lot of genealogical "stuff". You also know that I take very seriously the responsibility that comes with such a legacy, spending a lot of time and money to digitize and preserve my precious collection, not only for myself but for family as well.  That is why I really appreciate Marian's book, Planning a Future for Your Family's Past.

Since my father passed away in 2005, I have inherited his family photos, documents and artifacts a bit at a time as my step-mother came across things or cleaned out various rooms in their home, culminating in three car-loads that I brought home just over a year ago.  It was overwhelming, and other than the items and photos that I have digitized and photographed, it is only roughly sorted, as Marian puts it.

At the beginning of this year, I made a list of my genealogy goals and some of those goals were about digitizing, sharing and preserving my collection, but a comprehensive, long-term plan was still missing. When I had first tried to make a genealogical will over a year ago, I didn't get very far before becoming frustrated and moving on. Having read Marian's book, I now realize that I was putting the cart before the horse. With her method there were two very important tasks to complete before I could get to that step and it just makes so much sense.

Marian's PASS method has four steps - Prepare by organizing your materials, Allocate ownership, then Set up a genealogical will and finally, Share with heirs. These steps are broken down even further in the book. Although I still have a big job ahead of me, it now seems doable and much less stressful.

Each chapter in Marian's book is filled with great tips from her many years of experience in taking these steps herself. She shares many resources and stories along the way, showing us by example that organizing isn't taking away precious time from research, it can actually help us in our research, leading to discoveries we might not make otherwise. Each chapter also ends with a very useful summary, a great feature.

Planning a Future for Your Family's Past is so filled with great information that you might think you're in for a long read. Thankfully, Marian has packed all of this into a book that can easily be read at one sitting, although I'm sure I will find myself referring to it over and over as I finally prepare my precious collection for the day that I, too, as Marian says, am an ancestor.

I believe Marian's book will finally help me achieve the goal of readying my precious research and mementos for another generation, and I'm sure it can get you there, ttoo

Planning a Future for Your Family's Past is available from Amazon for Kindle and in print.

The Elusive Organizing Ideal

My head is still spinning from the season finale of The Blacklist, so I hope I can write a lucid post!

I've realized as I've thought about this post throughout the day that it is going to be at least as much about theory as it will about my actual organizational conventions. Sounds exciting, doesn't it?

When I started scanning these slides of Dad's with the old scanner a few years ago I hadn't had any exposure to the many organizational techniques and ideas of my fellow GeneaBloggers and other genealogists. I just filed them on my computer in a way that made sense to me at the time, which was by carousel (that's the slide holder that fits into the projector and, in my case, has capacity for 140 slides). Although I have modified my file naming somewhat, I am still doing it this way and it turns out that this is something of an archival method of organization because I am organizing them the way that I got them. This, according to this post by Sue Adams, which I found referenced in this post by Tony Proctor, is an archival arrangement; grouping records according to their creator and in the same order as their creator. Of course, real archival organizing is much more complicated, but at least Tony Proctor's post, and the others he refers to within, gave me some assurance that this was a valid way to organize my images.

My Epson Perfection V370 gives me the following screen when I'm ready to scan:

At the purple arrow I'm telling the program where to save the image files and at the green arrow I am giving all of these files the same prefix, in this case "Car1." which will then be followed by the number of the slide's order in the carousel. This file name doesn't tell me anything about the image itself, only which carousel it came from and which slide number it was in the carousel. Metadata will tell the rest of the story.

This is what that looks like on my Mac. Tags go in the box on top at the red arrow, if there were people in this slide (Pennie was my dad's Collie, not a person) I would have used additional tags like their Dollarhide number and last name. The file name is filled in automatically at the blue arrow and I use the comments box to add my name and copyright as well as details about the photo. All of this information is searchable.

Organization is one of those things that is very personal and what makes sense to me may not make sense to you and vice-versa. That is why there is no one way to do this, there is no ideal way except for each of us.

I will probably continue to use this method with at least some of my other image files. The posts I referred to above are full of good ideas and things to consider but I do also want to keep things relatively intuitive and simple. I hope this system will stand the test of time, but as they say, only time will tell.

Genealogy Do-Over - Do I Finally Have a System?

My paternal grandfather, Howard Matthews.
Always organized.

Do I finally have a research tracking system I can live with? It seems like all this planning and reading has been going on for way too long. But really, only time will tell as I put all these ideas into practice.

As I alluded to in my last post on this subject, staying organized has always been a challenge for me. One thing that helps me keep our living space organized is the mantra that professional organizers use often, "A place for everything and everything in it's place." This is something I need to keep in mind in organizing my genealogy, too. While I want to keep things as simple as possible, my genealogical finds and evidence need to have a place to go or I may just drop them somewhere random, never to be seen again.

This week I looked at where I wanted to keep four things:

• To do list
• Search attempts
• Citations
• Transcriptions

To Do List
I like keeping each ancestor's research note separate in Evernote, but I only want have one To Do List. I created a new Note in Evernote with a To Do List table and put a link to the Note in my research note template so that I can quickly get to the to do list from each research note.

You may notice that I started the name of this note with a period (.Research To Do List). That will make this note appear at or near the top of the list of notes when searching by name and make it easier to find.

Search Attempts
Search attempts, like the research log, will be kept in each individual note so I added this table to the template. This is a place to track all of the attempts I made to locate a record in a specific database.




Citations & Transcriptions
I really like Thomas MacEntee's idea of starting your evidence analysis in the research log, but unfortunately it isn't very practical in a table format. So what to do? How about using the Evidentia program I bought and paid for back in 2015? What an idea!

But that only deals with where to analyze my evidence, where else should I keep those citations so that they are accessible away from home and saved somewhere in the cloud for backup? I've decided to do two things with my citations and transcriptions. First will be to save a transcription of the document and the citation in Word document along with a digital image of the record and then upload the document to Dropbox. Then I will copy and paste the citation and transcription into the Evernote Note that contains a copy of the digital record.

I hope this post isn't too confusing. I had rewrite it a few times to make sure I was getting my points across. I hope I succeeded.

I'm going to put all of this into practice this week and put together a post to walk us through my process step-by-step. Wish me luck!

Genealogy Do-Over - Moving Towards a Research Tracking System - Choosing my platform

I thought I would be back with a post on Sunday but there just weren't enough hours in the weekend. I was lucky to find the time to scan a few photos that I want to post on Facebook during the week. That was the extent of anything genealogy-related for a few days. But this post is about organizing my genealogy research, not my home!

If there is one thing that my work life and previous genealogy research have taught me, it is that I will not remember the things that I think I will. Actually, that's a lesson I started learning in elementary school when my homework assignments weren't all completed because I wasn't writing them down. This was the subject of a parent-teacher meeting in about the 4th grade. Then my parents bought me a Ziggy pocket calendar. Now, thank goodness, I have much more helpful tools to choose from.

Not only do I need a research tracking system, I need something that won't be so complicated that I get lazy about using it, I need it to capture lots of information (because I won't remember it) and I'd much prefer it to be in Evernote so that I can access it offline when the need arises.

I really like Thomas MacEntee's research log in Excel, it holds a lot of information but it is still very easy to use. He has even included fields to allow you to start analyzing your evidence as you log it in. I gave it a shot last year, but my home computer is a Mac and at the time I didn't have Office 365 (the online subscription plan to Microsoft Office products). I was also in the process of deciding on a mobile computing option so I wasn't sure what my needs would be in that regard and didn't want to start something in Keynote (Apple's spreadsheet program) that might not be compatible with other devices.

Today, I do have Office 365 and I have the most basic Kindle Fire and a not-so-smart phone. Although I have yet to be able to take a deep dive into offline research, the reading I have done in the past few months has convinced me that I should have an option that includes mobile, offline access to my research logs. That means something that I can access on my Kindle (and a Chromebook when I can afford it) when there is no wireless available.

This is a long way of saying that although I like Excel, and there are some drawbacks to logging my research without it, I chose a method that uses Evernote. I mentioned Colleen Greene's blog and Evernote organization system in my last post. She has a system that seems a bit intimidating at first in terms of set-up but it looks to me like accessing the information will be quick and easy thanks to the ability to link notes together in Evernote, I love that. Here is an example of a research note for one of my grandparents:

As you can see, I have been able to link to other ancestors' notes and to documents that are saved in Evernote. This is not a replacement for genealogy software, as Colleen Greeen herself points out, but this section can give you access to facts and documents for easy reference.

Now, because the above information is in a table, rather than a spreadsheet, you can't add endless columns without reducing column width. That is where Excel has it all over Evernote, but I'm working on a solution to that which would basically involve multiple tables in the same document. But I am also experimenting with linked notes instead.

Hopefully I will have this all worked out by the end of next weekend so that I can share it with you then and get my research going again! 

Genealogy Do-Over - Moving Towards a Research Tracking System - Tagging

Here we are in month four of the year-long Genealogy Do-Over and I finally have my Evernote just about in order. I thought this would be a good time to share what I am doing, even though NONE of these ideas are my own!

As I shared a few posts back (at least), I started getting serious about Evernote when I read Kerry Scott's How to Use Evernote for Genealogy a couple of months ago. The book was very helpful in understanding the program in general and Kerry shared many ideas about using it for genealogy specifically.

I found more help organizing on Colleen Greene's blog in a fantastic series of posts. By the way, I found these posts by doing a search of all the GeneaBlogs. Did you know you could do that? Easy-peasy.

It took a little bit for me to fully absorb all of Colleen's techniques and decide what I would use for myself, but I'm well on my way now. As an added bonus, some of these techniques are also helping me name and tag the digital files on my Mac and in Dropbox, and that is where I am going to start.

It has been a challenge for me to find a file-naming system that works. I don't like impossibly-long file names, they irk me and they feel like they aren't going to be much help in searches anyway. Thomas MacEntee's webinar on Metadata was a big help in this regard. Knowing that I can tag my photos and other files (like a census record) to identify all the relevant ancestors, without having to name them all in the file name, is great! The only drawback for me is that my personal computer is a Mac, which doesn't offer as many fields in the metadata, but the tagging is really working for me. Even better, I'm now tagging those files with their Dollarhide number instead of names so my tagging is quicker and tags are consistent across my multiple platforms.

For those who might be new to the Dollarhide numbering system as I was, here is a link to a good explanation of how it works. Long story short, everyone gets a number. At first I said, "No way!" I thought it was going to be too much work, that every time I wanted to save and tag something it would take forever. But I quickly realized that it didn't have to be that hard. Starting at the beginning and going through about 5 generations, I made a table in Word with just two columns; one for the name, last name first, and one for their number. The table can then be sorted by number or by name so look-ups are quick and easy. As I save documents with other ancestors in them, they are added to the chart which is re-sorted and saved.

As for other tags, I just try to anticipate the reasons I might access a file in the future, whether it be a document, a photo, a blog post or anything. Perhaps I might write a blog post about City Directories and want to look at all the City Directory pages I have saved in Evernote, perhaps I'll want to show a cousin everything I have collected about our grandparents' home town. Whatever different ways or reasons I think I might want to search for records in the future, I'll need tags to accomplish that task.

One other note about tagging and metadata. I was hoping to be able to search by the tags in my metadata to help find items saved to Dropbox but, as of now, Dropbox does not have this capability. My filing system will have to help me find what I'm looking for there. Or I can look for the filename on my Mac and use that to find the document on Dropbox (for sharing for example).  I also experimented to see if Dropbox would save the metadata for me even if I couldn't use it and I was happy to see that it did, even across different platforms. For example, I tagged a document on my Mac, uploaded it to Dropbox, downloaded it on my PC at the office and found all of my tags still there - yes!

So that is my new tagging system. I'll have more on Evernote tomorrow.