How to Organise Research Notes

[Sally]

I thought it may be interesting and useful to see how people organise their research notes and files. Do you file your notes by Surname or ID? Hopefully established researchers and newbies will find others comments and tips interesting and useful and I for one will be hoping for some good tips as I looked at my pile of paperwork yesterday after a while away from it (I wonder why ... might have something to do with setting up web sites :) ) and decided a strong cup of coffee was needed to tackle the pile and find out where to start picking it all up again .. I can't be the only one this has happened to ... am I?

BFN
Sally
PS The intrepid TM Gang please note I said COFFEE not drinks ... but if I don't get any good tips it may need a tot of the amber nectar to deal with it :)

[chrisg]

the information I logged on the message board yesterday from somebody at Essex university who has done a tremendous amount of research into his family tree and clearly cross referenced information looking at the website - I picked up lots of good tips from how he is presenting his information

sure we can all learn from the gang here too

Chris

[kaye]

Hi Sally and Chris,

Quite sometime ago, when I was approaching 1,000 people in my tree, I found that I was spending far too much time looking for information and sifting through all my paper work and not finding what I needed....very frustrating.

I made several attempts at trying to organise all this paper work, but nothing I tried worked, however, slowly, but surely I managed to 'get on top of it all' and for a minimum cost of folders. (I had already spent loads on other stuff which didn't work for me) I solved my problem.

I have a very large desk, with shelves either end, my mother's line is on one side of me and my fathers on the other.

Every folder has parents names, as well as children.....as children marry, I make reference to their folder on the parents folder.
Everything within the folder is indexed, eg, BMD indexes, census, certificates, photographs including houses, places of employment, churches, etc, indentures, Wills and so on.

I have several wordpad documents within each folder, telling of what I know of that particular family, as well as the history and sociology of their times for that particular UK town/village, Regimental histories, Wars, medals, history of their trades etc and so on.

I also have a seperate shelf for Military documents, Wills and large documents.

My theory is that, who ever takes over my research will know as much as I do and not just have a long list of names and dates and never being able work out who belongs to whom.

It is really very simple, the hardest being writing the wordpad documents, but they can be done at leisure.

I am happy with what I have done and no longer do I have to go scrounging and rifling through piles of notes etc...just reach for a folder to check something or to update it.

Kaye.

[maggiefishblue]

Hi Kaye,

Your organisation of your notes puts me to shame :redface: In my minds eye you have done exactly what I want to do - but where to begin .... :rolleyes:

I have about 600 of my ancestors on Tribalpages and have about the same amount on Legacy 5.0 - but I want a paper record for my grandchildren - especially my elder grandson (age 12) who is really interested in what I'm doing and I want to pass it on to him in the future :smilie:

I had thought about getting a nicely bound notebook to put the main branches in for him and then to file the information in a way similar to yours - I have always prided myself on being organised but I just can't seem to get to grips with this mammoth task ... :redface: I think perhaps I spend too much time on PM posting messages :p

Thanks for the inspiration to get on with it ....

Maggie :smilie:

[kaye]

Hi Maggie, :smilie:

I put the dining room 'out of bounds' for 3 weeks, then every day I used to take piles of print outs and go around saying 'yes he goes here' and 'she goes there, 'this is their daughter' and so on.......something like dealing cards and playing snap.
You should have seen the room, could hardly move without slipping on sheets of paper.

When I look back, yes it was pretty daunting, but I was so cheesed off with it all that I stuck at it until I had families all in piles and one by one they were double checked and put aside to await the final battle, the labeling of the folios.

Then came the sorting of the history and sociology etc and writing it all onto wordpad, which I actually enjoyed doing...history lover that I am.

I do have a beautiful suede covered book, do you remember the old photo albums that have black pages and you used to put the photo corners in to hold the photos ? Well I managed to get hold of one when I was in Germany the last time. I have every family and member listed in gold pen and a short message of their dates, churches of baptisms, marriages, cemeteries, I'm still working on it, so it may well end up with even more info in it.

A word of warning though, if you have a cat, don't let him anywhere near when your doing all the sorting, otherwise he/she will think your playing and decide to try to help you !

Kaye. :smilie: