I am slowly drowning in a sea of documents! Does this sound familiar?
As most Family Historians know there needs to be well documented research for all our findings. But what to save and where to save it can lead to the above “drowning” in the Family History documentation!
I haven’t been doing Family History for that long, probably only 15-20 years. But I must admit that I am still to find the optimum system for saving my documentation. I shudder to think of the documents that some Family Historians of long standing must have, do they have a annex to their house?
Sometimes the weirdest document may have a mention of an ancestor that it isn’t written about. But you accidentally came across the mention of an ancestor SOOOO of course you have to save it, don’t you? Well I do and then I usually forget where I have saved it or forget all about reading it!
But most of my finds are documented on the said ancestor”s page in my Family Tree Program or a printed copy is saved to a folder. Then a lot of things are also saved and scanned into my computer which is also saved to the “Cloud”. I am not sure yet how to find them in the “Cloud” but if I ever need to I will find someone to help me with that then! For the moment I don’t need to retrieve anything.
It is truely mind boggling how much documentation is now available in this age of technology.
Most things are available at the touch of a button. If someone had told me twenty years ago that I could be reading a newspaper from the 1800s from the comfort of my armchair, I would have laughed! Does anyone else get that tingling feeling when they read an old newspaper article or is it just me?
But today we are blessed with Ancestry, Family Search, Find My Past. Trove, UK Newspapers, Google and many, many more options.
We can read books online and scan the relevant information. Our Libraries are online and even if they haven’t a physical copy of a book you can usually get an inter-library loan to search for that elusive document. I have done this and was able to bring the book home and read and scan at my leisure, making references as to where I got the information from.
Of course Family History isn’t the only thing that is contributing to my drowning in documentation. I am a crafter as well. So I also have many online courses and patterns, that I download and file in folders and save on my computer. I just can’t seem to go with just one method of documentation, I am afraid. I like to read things in print on paper, but what if I had a fire? I don’t want to lose anything so I save it on the computer as well.
Yes you guessed it I am just going to keep swimming strongly and keep these treasured documents in multiple places and hopefully keep my head above water!!
