21COFH - Family Papers Organization - Week 42

This week we are going to delve into family papers a little deeper. In week 40 we took an inventory. You can read what I did using OneNote. Last week we did a little filing to clean things up a bit. So this week, it's time to select a portion of the collection to work with in more depth.

My responses to this project are included in this post in italics.

1. Using your inventory, select a portion of your collection to organize in more detail.

I selected the four boxes of Dad's papers.
 

2. If you haven't already, take a look at this group of papers, are there certain documents that are grouped together or should be? We need to be careful at this step not to disturb items that should be left together or that we are unsure of. More papers or information may turn up to help us organize those documents later on. For this step make notes.

Since I'm pretty familiar with Dad's life, organizing has been fairly easy. Dad's early years are what I need to be careful of. 

After looking through the files I had previously set up when Dad's papers came to me, I could see there were the following broad groupings:

• Auto
• Business
• Childhood
• Community, Civic
• College
• Correspondence
• Financial
• Health
• Military
• Real Estate
• School
• Travel
• Yearbooks
• Young Adult Years

The categories in bold are the ones I need to be careful of since I'm not as familiar with those portions of Dad's life and there isn't anyone around to ask. Correspondence is in bold only because most of Dad's correspondence is from the teen and early adult years.
 

3. Arrange the papers.

As I did this, I made notes on the category list from above as to which box(es) each category was placed in.
 

4. Label the box(es).

Each of the four boxes was labeled with Dad's name, his year of birth and death, and the box number.
 

5. Write up a short description of this collection or series of papers for your project notebook.

Mine included:

• A very short biography of 3 or 4 sentences.
• How it came into my possession.
• The size (4 boxes) and where they are stored.
• List of the categories from above and which box(es) each category is located in.

This project took about two hours to complete.

Next week we will go into more detail with one of the categories.

Remember to select something you can complete this week. It can be one box or even one file folder.

Tell us about your experience either in the comments or a post of your own (be sure to leave the url in the comments).

 

Good luck!

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© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum