52 Ancestors Week 43: Organization

 From Amy Johnson Crow: This week's theme is "Organized." Organizing can refer to papers, files, etc., but it can also refer to people. Did your ancestor belong to any organizations? Did your ancestor organize any activities?

Yes, sir. I'll have this organized and on your desk by 5.

   

     Genealogists can be a bit untidy when it comes to accumulating tons and tons of documents. It's the nature of the field of study! We all know genealogists tend to have a lot in common with writers, scientists and any other field where you're almost always required to have a messy office. If you're doing anything creative or any kind of research and your office is clean, you have to wonder if you're really into the field or you just like to keep things organized.  Also, I have to wonder if your computer is organized, too. Believe me when I say that it helps! Here's what I do to keep my computer organized.

Somehow I STILL have space left over.

    My brother works in IT for the University of Virginia and every once in a while he pokes at my computer remotely to see if things are running properly. In his own words, he has said that I practically live in my computer. Who doesn't in this day and age? Look at the image. I have folders for my comics, my old videos and yes even a genealogy folder. 

    I've always made it a point to keep everything in its own folders since long before I started doing genealogy regularly. Everything has its place and it's been like that since I got my first computer many years ago.

Let's take a tour of the genealogy folder shall we? Let's!

    As you can see there isn't much to see here other than a bunch of subfolders. I have folders for articles, the images I use in the blogs, DNA stuff, photos, stuff for a friend's tree that I'm working on and WikiTree stuff. I've downloaded many things and it didn't take long for me realize that it was all going to take over my computer. The folder itself takes up one gigabyte and I don't think I have to worry about space for a very, very long time. If you have a decent amount of space and memory, you should be fine.

    However, if you're worried that you will run out of space for that and your favorite PC games, you could always put your genealogy stuff on a flash drive or an external hard drive. I use a flash drive myself and on it are my comics and of course documents from my genealogical adventure. 

  Since I have a ton of stuff, I'm not going to go over every single thing I have. That'd be crazy! So, instead let's talk about the articles, documents and photos folders!

    As you can see I've amassed quite a few articles from Newspapers.com and the Newburyport Public Library. I should organize the articles better by saying where I got each article. But, I don't think it makes much of a difference. I will say that it's nice to have a pdf of the article rather than just something from a screencap. I like it because you get a chance to see what else is on the page and some of the advertisements are just hilarious to me in hindsight.

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    I think the real meat of my genealogy folders is probably the pictures. You'd think the documents folder would have a lot of stuff and it does. I just have more photos than anything in there!

    All of my photographs are carefully organized into colorizations, maternal, paternal and miscellaneous as I have a ton of photos like I said. I like to keep the colorized photographs in their own folder as I'm not really a fan of them to be honest. They're nice and everything. But, MyHeritage and other places that offer colorization and repair don't seem to get certain details right.

    For example, they give my great-grandfather, Vincenzo Ferraiolo blond hair when his hair was actually brownish before it went completely white. According to my mother, my great-grandfather Austin Felker had the bluest blue eyes ever. Colorization makes them brown. It's cool if you like them. It's just really hit or miss with me. There's not much else I can say about this folder. That's what it says on the tin.

    Now it's time to look at the genealogical gold! Not that the photographs aren't gold. They are. It just takes up the most space.

    The documents folder is where everything else goes. In there you'll find everything I've ever saved that isn't a photograph. I've downloaded every document I could find about my ancestors and various relatives and put them in here for safe keeping.

    This folder also includes several Excel sheets I've used for organizing my DNA matches and creating Leeds charts for them. I've also got drafts for letters to the commune office in San Pietro a Maida and various other files.

I guess you could say I am very well organized! And yes I do have a backup for all of these files.

    Why wouldn't you have a backup? Like I said before, you could always save the documents you have onto an external hard drive or even a zip drive like I have done. Genealogists accumulate a lot of material and there is a fine line between hoarding and collecting. If you're going to be a genealogist, the best way to go about dealing with the gigabytes of data you will accumulate is to keep it organized and in a safe place. Oh and as far as physical copies of stuff goes, don't worry. Those are well organized too and in safe spots. I may talk about them some other time. I hope you enjoyed this sneak peak into my computer. =)

See ya next time!