Flip-Pal & National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Flip-Pal "pink" bundle

As part of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Flip-Pal is offering a special "pink" bundle. It contains a Flip-Pal mobile scanner, a pink Deluxe Carry Case and a pink lid cover. The pink lid cover can be purchased separately also.

Here's the scoop. The bundle is priced at $159.29 for October. It is normally $176.99. The lid cover can be purchased separately at $14.39.

Just go to the Flip-Pal site by clicking here. Over on the left side-bar, click on the emblem that says, "October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month." From there you can make your selection(s).

Flip-Pal pink lid cover
 

Disclaimer:  I am an affiliate for Flip-Pal. This means I receive a small amount of compensation for each sale generated from this blog. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely those of the blog owner. However, I will only endorse products or services that I believe, are worthy of such endorsement.

21COFH - The Dreaded F Word - Week 41

Filing. That's what we're doing this week. If you're like me your probably thinking, "Ick." It's one of those necessary evils.

There's any number of ways you can approach this week's project. Here are some suggestions:

1. Tell yourself right now that skipping this week is not an option. Even if you only spend 5 or 10 minutes on it, that is still progress.
2. Select one or more boxes, bags or other containers of family papers and move them to a more appropriate storage situation. This can be in archival material or just something that is better than the old dusty, musty boxes they are in right now. If you do this, please pay attention and try to keep things in their original order for now.
3. Take that box or bag of papers that you know all about: who they belonged to, what they were for, when they were created. Integrate them into your currently well organized filing system. Don't have one yet? Now is a great time to start!
4. How about that pile of papers from a previous research trip you never got around to putting away? This week is a great time to start.

Remember to update your project notebook with your accomplishments.

Questions? Comments?

Good luck!

URL for this post: http://turning-of-generations.blogspot.com/2012/10/21cofh-dreaded-f-word-week-41.html

© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum

Family Papers Inventory - 21COFH

This was a project I needed to complete as much has been added to the family papers collection since I last took inventory. Boxes have been shuffled. More is being added all the time.

Using the photo inventory I set up in OneNote back in February, I made a few minor modifications to include documents.

Under the Inventories tab, I added my inventory of documents to my Inventory Form.

Under the Overview tab, I started a new page called Summary of Family Papers and wrote a short description similar to the one I did for the photo collections previously.

There you have it, easy-peezy. We now have expanded the usefulness of our "Project Notebook."

This post was written in response to Family Papers - Week 40.

URL for this post: http://turning-of-generations.blogspot.com/2012/10/family-papers-inventory-21cofh.html

© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum

21COFH - Family Papers - Week 40

Previously we have worked extensively with our family photos. This week we are going to begin looking at family papers. Remember the Project Notebook we set up way back in week 14? We will be adding to it.

This week we will take inventory of our family papers. Note: you may have done this in the week 5 project where we inventoried our photographs. If you did, then this week will be an easy one! At any rate the instructions are very similar to the photo inventory.

The level of detail for this activity should depend upon the time you have available this week and the extent of your physical collection of papers. It’s better to have a very general, short inventory than none at all!

Suggested steps to follow:

1. Move in an organized, methodical fashion. One suggestion is to go room by room, moving clockwise around the room.

2. Note each box, album (or groups of), pile or other unit of storage. You could describe the box (red shoe box) or you could number your boxes.

3. When looking at the contents, make note of:

a.    General provenance – who’s papers were they, how did they come to be in your possession? If there is any additional background, this is a good time to note it.

b.    Surname(s) included in the box.

c.    General time frame and subject matter.

d.    Format, size ranges and quantity. This will be helpful if you need to order archival storage supplies.

e.     Note concerns and items needing attention, rescue, or other triage such as folded brittle papers.

f.     Other items such as address books, heirloom items, etc. Often when someone’s home gets packed up, different types of objects get tossed together in the same box.

g.     Anything else you consider important.

4. If you have a lot of papers, you might want to move boxes to your work area as you inventory and then return them to their original location.

5. Please remember, if you remove items from boxes, it’s important to keep things in their original order.

After completing the inventory, you will be more familiar with your collection. Write a paragraph generally describing the collection and keep it with the inventory. Consider including:

· When and who you received the papers from.

· If there were previous owners or other history, mention it.

· Where the collection is located now.

· Size of the collection.

· Mini collections within your overall collection.

 

Tell us about your inventory experience, the format you used and, if you want, share your paragraph. You can do so either in the comments or a post of your own (be sure to leave the url in the comments).

Good luck and remember to keep this project to what you can complete this week.
URL for this post: http://turning-of-generations.blogspot.com/2012/10/21cofh-family-papers-week-40.html

© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum

I've Got E-mail! Lots of It! 21COFH Week 39

So much for getting my e-mail system written up and posted "tomorrow"! This has been a challenging week to say the least. Without further delay here are my e-mail comments.

I have opted to keep genealogy related emails both in gmail and on my computer. Here's the workflow:

• After reading an incoming e-mail, I save it (or the entire thread, if we have been corresponding back and forth).  Pdf is the format I have settled on. That way if any files have been attached, the filename and often a thumbnail of the image are included. Since pdf is an accepted standard today, it should be around for years to come. I understand Rich Text Format (rtf) is another good format to save in.

• Next, I add tags to the metadata which might include surnames, localities and general topics (such as military, land, etc) as appropriate. I can use the description field to include additional information, including a citation, if appropriate.

• Where? There are a couple options here. One is to save under the surname of the individual I'm corresponding with. Another option is the surname of the subject family we are discussing. Since I have a correspondence folder under each surname, that's the folder it goes in.

• What about attachments? I've decided to go into the metadata, create a source citation, provenance or whatever is appropriate and use tags. Then the attachment is filed just as any other document or photo would be: in a surname or locality folder. I still have a way of tying the attachment and the e-mail together because of the citation included in the attachment and the pdf automatically includes the attachment info.

• Once I'm done processing the e-mail (it sounds complicated but it really only takes minutes) and making any notes or inputting to my genealogy software, I will add tags/labels to the e-mail and file it in the appropriate surname, locality or subject folder in gmail.

Confession time. I get really far behind with this and make a point of plugging away as I am able. When I do, I am rewarded because I can easily find what I'm looking for. Motivation to try and stay caught up!

Oh yeah, one more thing. Sometimes I print this stuff out and file it. There's times when an item is so important it just needs to be on paper too!

How about you? How do you handle your genealogy related e-mail?

URL for this post: http://turning-of-generations.blogspot.com/2012/09/ive-got-e-mail-lots-of-it-21cofh-week-39.html

Photo credit: Nieve44/La Luz

 © 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum

21COFH - E-mail! Week 39

This week we are going to spend some time organizing our e-mail. Don't worry about getting to "Inbox Zero." Although it's nice to dream about, some of us have a ways to go before we get to that point. This week just try to make some progress and if you haven't already, set up a system or work flow.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Do you want your family history related e-mails to reside in the "cloud," on your computer, or both?
2. If they are to live on your computer, what format will they take? PDF? TXT? Or another format?
3. How will they be organized?
4. For e-mails living in your e-mail program (gmail, yahoo, etc.), how are you going to organizing them. Or will you?
5. What about attachments? How will you handle those?
6. Is this a very important e-mail? Perhaps it needs to reside in several places. Use the LOCKSS principle where appropriate. (LOCKSS = Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe)

Don't forget you may need to analyze some of the information in those e-mails and enter that in your genealogy data base.

Remember you don't need to get all of your email cleaned up this week. Just get a system going, if you haven't already, and make some progress.

Questions? Comments? Blog posts of your own? You know what to do!

Now go out and conquer. Any progress is good progress.

Check back tomorrow for my approach.


URL for this post: http://turning-of-generations.blogspot.com/2012/09/21cofh-e-mail-week-39.html

© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum

21COFH - Digitizing Course Materials

This week's project is to digitze some of our paper formatted educational materials. I decided to digitize four 3-ring binders full of course material from a series of classes I took. This cleared off some serious shelf space and will hopefully make the information more accessible.

I used my Fujitsu ScanSnap and fed pages in batches. The software allowed me to create one large PDF of the material from each course. Then I just named the file with the title of each course. Easy Peasy!

It felt oh so good to be able to recycle the paper and see a big hole in one of my shelves!

URL for this post: http://turning-of-generations.blogspot.com/2012/09/21cofh-digitizing-course-materials.html

© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum