Ancestry Daily News
  Beau Sharbrough – 3/13/2003

Rootsworks: Electronic Organization

How do you answer these questions?
  • How many e-mails do you receive each week? Do you typically plan to organize them later, but then never get around to it?
  • How many image files have you scanned? How much time do you spend trying to find one of them?
  • How many times have you tried to organize your genealogy office the way that some columnist or expert suggested, and then abandoned it after a couple of weeks because it wasn't worth the trouble?

    What is Electronic Organization?
    Our goal is simple. It's to be able to keep track of records. Accomplishing that goal requires that we go through two steps: making decisions (once), and acting on them (over and over).

    Step One: Decisions. You have to decide, for each record that you receive, what is its right place at this time. It might arrive by postal mail, e-mail, or from a website. Define the categories, and define how you'll handle them. Sometimes it helps to "start with the end in mind." Just clear your mind and imagine how your organized office might work, and how you might expect letters, e-mails, and other documents to flow through. You have to commit to the concept.

    A goal without a scheduled completion date is just a dream. Many of us have been dreaming about getting organized someday. If that works for you, stick with it. Otherwise, be ready to write a date next to your goals, and to try to finish by that time. And be realistic - Rome wasn't built in a day.

    Step Two: Action. A lot of us start off with a quick decision and a flurry of action that lasts between half an hour and two weeks. Then we start taking short cuts and the next thing we know, we have a plan that we haven't acted on in months. The organization of records, once so real, has evaporated into a theoretical organization, and when we talk about it to others, we sound like our parents.

    Start off simply. You can always make your office information flow diagram more complicated. Then commit yourself to the project.

    Organization isn't in your papers. It's in you. It's your commitment to yourself to be consistent. Electronic organization is the ongoing implementation of decisions that you make to help you keep track of things.

    Computer Filing
    We're talking, for starters, about organizing your desktop and your e-mail.

    Windows users face a difficult choice: Use the "Desktop" or "My Documents" as the main method of filing. If I could make a suggestion, you might consider using the Desktop to "queue" records until you act on them ("queue" is a French word meaning "a stack of papers I plan to get around to later"). At that time, you can choose to delete them, or file them permanently in My Documents. This approach mirrors our approach to dealing with paper records -- we queue them, act on them, and then either dispose of them or put them away for future reference.

    Whichever method you use, you'll need to create some "nested folders" -- folders inside folders -- for storing the records. This is something that you wouldn't do with manila folders. That would be hard to work with. There are several approaches in folder organization, but they generally are variations of mixing functions (correspondence, scanning), families (the wife's, the husband's), and record types (census, wills, land records).

    Some people make a folder for each family that they are working on, and within that folder, they make one for each record type. Others make folders for each record type (mail, web pages, census, etc.) and put folders for families inside them. The great thing about personal computing is that you get to choose what works best for you. Whatever you choose, stick to it and next year, you'll be able to find the record you file today. Renew your commitment to creating and maintaining order.

    Folder structure is helpful, but naming files is another important source of organization. If you adopt a "naming convention" for your records, and use it consistently, you can use computer searches for documents. One area where many computer novices miss this chance is in naming photos and scanned documents. Your scanner might suggest that you name a file "untitled1.jpg." Please don't do this. If you include the names of the persons, places, and dates in the file name, you can search on those words later.

    E-Mail Filing
    If you do a Google search on "e-mail organization" you will find a lot of variations on a simple theme. Create a folder structure that has meaning to you, and use the filing capabilities of your e-mail program to put your mail into the appropriate folder.

    To that theme I would add a couple of suggestions:

    1) You're gonna have to file some e-mail manually. Set aside time to file your e-mail just like you set aside time to file your paper documents.

    2) Consider variations on the spelling of folders, to push certain topics to the top and bottom. You might name a folder "A-Smith Leads" instead of "Smith Leads" to get it to the top of the list, for example.

    What's the Down Side?
    Organization takes energy. It also takes time.

    Some people can be too organized, and they spend time, money, and energy on folders and labels and filing and plastic trays and rubbermaid tubs and it turns out to be more than they can justify. What is this basis for justification? It's the amount of time you spend looking for records that you've already handled. If you spend more than you save, you've gone too far. Let's keep this in perspective.

    Filing isn't rocket science. It's often drudgery. But it beats looking for previously filed records.

    Where's the Genealogical Tie-In?
    Each genealogist, whether amateur or professional, is running a research office. Sometimes the office is one cardboard box, or what my kids call "a bag of dead Sharbroughs." Researchers are constantly collecting records to help them reconstruct the lives of historic persons. And excuse me if this doesn't apply to you, but they generally manage their records badly. They can't tell you what book or film roll the copied pages came from. They can't tell you where or when they saw the record. One of the most important products of our research is the communication to others of how to independently review the evidence we saw. Personally, I'm frustrated when someone tells me that a certain fact is, "On the Web. Look it up." I'm a skeptic.

    What Else?
    One of the most useful approaches to genealogy research that I have seen is the maintenance of logs: correspondence logs, research logs, document inventories, and the like. If you file your e-mail and documents consistently, the computer file timestamps will produce these logs for you.

    At the RootsWorks site, www.rootsworks.com/organization, I've included examples of some popular filing methods, and I invite you to further discussion of the topic at the RootsWorks Forums (also described below). There are also some links to other sites that contribute to the discussion of organization.

    In summary, I'm sure that you realize that organization isn't something you are, it's something you do. Repeatedly.

    The RootsWorks series of articles focuses on genealogical applications for generic technologies. Beau would like to hear from you. Whether you have something to add or something to ask, please point your browser here to discuss this or any topic related to the use of technology in family history. Please note that he cannot assist you with your individual computer problems. Visit the RootsWorks website at rootsworks.com for links to previous articles and Beau's lecture schedule.

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