Granny's Genealogy

Genealogy?

January 19th, 2012 | Posted by Granny Pam in Organize! | What's going On - (2 Comments)

I’ve spent the last couple of years immersed in my genealogy society, trying to assist in a number of ways. I woke up one morning in December and realized that I had not worked on my own projects for some time.

Well, that’s not exactly true, I have continued to collect information, but I haven’t entered it into my database. I have a mammoth file folder in my computer containing unentered data. The great majority are photos, census pages and obituaries. However, there are also birth, death and marriage records, news articles, graduation announcements, funeral cards and a huge variety of other ~~crap~~ items that I have collected. I started earlier this week, and right now I am down to 1419 items in the file folder. Holy cow, I wonder when I will get done wading through this mess? In addition to that, I have a file folder of items that have not been scaned yet, and the accompanying notes. I think I will be leaving the scanned items for the end of the project, but depending on progress, I may have to move some of it up.

One problem I am having is that when I open up a record for a person, I find that some of the citations are not up to my current standards. After looking carefully at the calendar, I have decided to fix the “truly horrible”, but leave the others. How am I judging this? If I could find the source for the information by reading the citation, it stands, perfect or imperfect. If I cannot tell what in the world I was thinking, I am looking up the information again, or putting it on a list until I have a good source.

I am going on a trip to Salt Lake City in April, and I want to have some semblance of order before I leave. After all, how do I know what to look for if I do not know what I know? Really.

In order to reach my goal, I have been looking at each file, one by one. If it is a family I think I want to search in SLC, I am entering the data. If not, I have made a file folder within the “unentered data” folder with the family name and I file the item there for now. I am hoping to have a good handle on my families before April, wish me luck?

Has anyone else out there let information pile up like this? How are you dealing with it?

Holy Cow!

I Did It! (Almost)

September 3rd, 2009 | Posted by Granny Pam in Don't Try This | Organize! | Tools and Information | What's going On - (3 Comments)

Remember the box, and the resolution to enter all the data into my genealogy database? On June 6th, I checked how I was doing, and found that I had fallen miserably short on the data entry end of things.

When I assessed my progress on August 2th, I was feeling a little better about the progress I had made.

Today, my pile looks like this:

Right, it is GONE. Sorry to yell, but this is a big deal to me. I finished entering all the data from my pile. Nothing left but dust. I was about to declare myself a big winner, and have a drink:

But, then I realized that the filing is not complete:
to file

I think I can do the filing in one day, and I have chosen tomorrow to do that.

I won’t be celebrating for too long, I have a ways to go before I can really declare myself a winner. The next problem is the data entry from the files on my computer. I just looked at the computer folder which contains results from numerous trips. I have been to courthouses, libraries, cemeteries, even Salt Lake City, and my results are stored neatly in folders with the date and the place I visited. There are notes, transcriptions, and pictures. The pictures are of deeds, of graveyards, and of pages in books, and there are photos of microfilm boxes showing the number of the film, and of microfilm screens, showing data about some person of interest.

The fact that it is all neatly organized into folders is some consolation, but not a lot. The parent folder is massive: 4.63 Gb, 79 sub-folders, 4984 files. I’m not sure how long it will take me look at, evaluate, transcribe (if necessary) and enter the data I have collected in those 79 folders. I also have some hand written notes that go with some of the files:
to do