ORGANIZING THE CHAOS

 ORGANIZING THE CHAOS

Source: Bing clip art

I am confessing right now to a mountain of family papers and pictures. Time for filing has been at a minimum the last several months.

What genealogy time I could make was spent searching on two family members: Winfield Scott APPLEBACH, and Susanna BOEHM.

I have dug around through Family Search, Ancestry, Fold 3, Newspapers.com, and Google collecting all the info possible. And worse, it has been saved as both digital and paper. Can we say no real organization?

This morning I decided it was time to tackle the issue and organize the chaos now that I have two computer screens to work with again.

I find it so much easier to have a file open on one computer screen while I move documents and photos into it from the second screen.

Since I actually have computer files for these two people already, it was easier to start with the downloads that were on the computer. So, two and half hours later, the APPLEBACH and BOEHM files have been updated. One success!

Now to the second part of this mess. So, the first step was making piles of all the last names. Obviously, this mess started before limiting my search to just the two above names. Seven stacks later, I look at the clock and realize that time is quickly passing.

I pull the BOEHM and APPLEBACH folders and piles of papers out of the stacks. It makes sense to me to start with the "A" family. 

More stacks by first name within the "A" family yields 10 piles of miscellaneous papers. Well ok, I found the two divorce decrees of my grandfather from his first and second wife. That is progress...

Another hour passes as I continue adding papers to the correct stacks by first name. Now I have 10 file folders of 10 individuals. Some of the files need to be divided into two because they are bulging. A few only have one or two pieces of paper in them.

Back to Winfield Scott APPLEBACH - known to me as "Uncle Scott". His file needs to be divided - all that research paid off in the form of information. But what a mess to organize. 

Scanning in the documents will take more hours than I have today. However, I have been using a naming system that I like and will stick with. Surname-Firstname_yyyymmdd_Location_item.

Moral to the story:

Keep up on your filing - whether digital or paper. It requires much less time than all the sorting later on. I saw on a genealogy blog a suggestion for spending 15 minutes a day doing filing. It certainly makes more sense than the mess I am currently dealing with.

Source: Bing clip art

Tomorrow is a new day, and I have the papers I want to scan in sitting on the scanner already to go. I am going to have to do better at committing 15 minutes most days to scanning and organizing. Especially on the days I do not do any research.

Organize the chaos before it becomes chaos.

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