Skip to main content

Paper, paper everywhere...

Paperwork got you down?


Today's project  = print, file, organize.

I'm a happy researcher now after having spent the past hour organizing my random collection of photos, sources, and comments saved on my already cluttered computer desktop.  Everything is now neatly arranged in family folders, photos have descriptive file names, and unnecessary files are in the recycling bin.  I even tackled the HUGE list of emails I've saved in a "family research" file in Thunderbird (Outlook for hippies...LOL).  Printed all and filed accordingly.  It's only taken me, oh, 9 months!

If you are a fellow genealogist, what's your preferred method/system of organizing all of the random bits and clues you collect along the way?  Outside of Family Tree Maker (a fabulous Ancestry.com product, by the way) which stores all source documents...how do you like to keep track of the emails from family, historical societies, etc.?  Still working on my own system.  I have two accordion files - one for each "tree".  Inside each, I have info filed by generational number.  Anything "paper" goes into the file...printed emails, random notes, items I've ordered via mail.  Otherwise, I have everything digital stored in Family Tree Maker and on my computer desktop (with identical copies stored on backup drive).

A nice way to end the week...feeling organized.  Now, to work on my closet....

-Sarah





Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pay It Forward

A bit of joy for my Friday! Our mail delivery within our little military community here in Sicily is so.very.sloooooow.  What makes it maddening is that it can be a combination of super-fast and super-slow...so no one seems to balk at the trend of inconsistency.  Maybe I complain enough for everyone :). I'm in the middle of a few genealogical mysteries - one of them being the family origins of a Mr. Joseph W. Daly, a paternal great-grandfather of my husband.  Like most of the challenging parts of our tree, I hit a wall with Joseph a few months back and promptly put him aside when something a little more lucrative came along.  For sake of ease.  Now, we meet again.  For this one, I even consulted a few curious friends.  I felt like maybe I wasn't searching deep enough or with the right "keywords" online or in my genealogy search engines.  Some researchers have favored methodologies for searching, and I felt I needed to branch out.  One ...
11 comments
Read more

Lingering Questions...

 There is a huge, genealogical elephant in my living room.   Every so often, he nudges me with his trunk, he asks for fresh water, and bats his long eyelashes at me in hopes that I will scratch behind his giant elephant ears. My theory about family history research is that nothing is as cut and dry as it seems at first.   Dig a little deeper – search a few newspaper archives – and you’ll either make your particular research question a) more complicated, or b) exceptionally clear in a way you never expected. By the time I actually his “POST” on this article, I will most likely have re-written it several times.   This elephant is giant.   HUGE.   Effecting the way an entire branch of my family will view its identity – even its surnames.   I’m putting on kid gloves.   But most importantly – I want to outline for my extended family and my future family exactly how I arrived at my present hypothesis.   I feel deeply convicted that ...
2 comments
Read more

Camp Butler - Newport News, Virginia

In my previous post I introduced my third great-grandfather - Hachaliah McMath, Jr. (1840-1916) - and his experience specifically at the end of the Civil war as a prisoner of war.  Context: Hachaliah McMath, Jr. is my 3rd great-grandfather on my father's maternal side of the family. After his capture in Farmville, Virginia following the Battle of Saylor's Creek, McMath was transferred to City Point, VA (Grant's headquarters) and then on to Newport News, Virginia.  From what I can determine, the Newport News area was occupied by Union troops for a large portion of the war.  Camp Butler was heavily fortified, as seen in the lithograph below - from the "Civil War in Newport News" collection of the Newport News Public Library System: Image Source From what I understand, the Prisoner of War camp was created alongside of Camp Butler to accommodate excess Confederate soldiers captured toward the end of the war.  Essentially - the POW camp in Newport News serve...
Post a Comment
Read more