Sorting Saturday - Organizing Research Documents

I'm taking the Family Tree University course, "Organize Your Genealogy: Get Your Research in Order (and Keep It That Way)" taught by Nancy Hendrickson. This week I chose to organize all of my "unprocessed" research that has been accumulating. You know, the stuff from the last trip to Salt Lake City, those death certificates I ordered but haven't entered into my database, the census records downloaded from Ancestry, and the list goes on. I seem to find documents faster than I can analyze and process them.

The first step was to gather up all of the piles and bins of semi-organized documents (I'm sure more will turn up). Next I spent a couple of hours doing a quick sort by surname and in some cases locality. Fortunately, I had been organizing and sorting in spurts along the way so the pile wasn't a complete disorganized mess. The problem I have is that life gets in the way and the half organized papers get stuffed in a pile somewhere and forgotten.

I had a file drawer in the room where I work that would be a perfect place to house these papers, so I cleaned it out and threw most of the stuff away. Yeah!! Using the advice of my daughter's fourth grade teacher that "the brain loves color," I decided to color code the files by my four grandparents' lines and file by surname within those four colors.

Hopefully with these files within easy reach of my workspace, I will make some good progress on processing the results of some of my research.


© 2010, copyright Michelle Goodrum