organising census images

[Berlin-Bob]

I also give everyone a unique reference tag; I use the first two letters of the surname, then the first two letters of the forename and then the date of birth.

eg.

maha1889: Margulies, Hanns, born 1889
codo1891: Coleman, Dora, 1891
but also with variants,
cojh1888: Coleman John Henry and
ferm1887: Ferrie, Robert Morrison

Another problem is with tags like bahe18xx, where I don't know the birthdate

I have two Warren Colemans, birthdate unknown, in the 19th century,
so I have cowa18xxs (Senior) and cowa18xx 

This tag is used in my excel database (so I can find all event from any particular person) and as a prefix for HTML pages on my website, photos, documents, etc.

This system works for me, as I only have several hundred names in my trees, but it probably won't work if you have several thousand names, especially if you have SMITH, JONES, EVANS etc in your trees.  In the long run, any numbering/naming system of tags, that fits your personal way of working will be the best system (for you  )

Bob

[KathMc]

Wouldn't it be great to be able to have an actuall face-to-face meeting to show people techniques that are used.  I am not too good with the explaining, but if someone showed me, I'd get it. I could always use more organization. 

Kath

[aspin]

Have you tried www.tribalpages.com
I have my tree entered in there also Family Tree

Elizabeth

[millymcb]

However you choose to save the documents on your computer you still want to be able to find them quickly.... For those sensible people (unlike me) who started an excel doument with names and codes on it at the beginning of their research rather than waiting until they had too many names to go and add!! .... ...You can create a hyperlink. 

That means that whenever you click on to the name or individual reference for the person ... it will instantly open up the document you want....just like when you click on a link on a web-site.


Choose which words you want to be the clickable bit. Point curser at it.  Right click and hold. At the bottom you will see - create hyperlink.   Go to this. It will open a box that asks you to browse for the document you want.   click it and that should be it.   The text should be blue on your document now (like on a website) - click it and fingers crossed the relevant doc should open. 

Warning - don't forget it is going direct to the original document so if you delete for any reason it is gone.

It works in Word too if you have any word docs....eg profiles of people. And you can use it for photos, websites - all sorts of things.

Unfortunately - I don't think you can use it in Family Tree Maker which is what I have - but I'm going to investigate now.















 

[hiraeth]

Have never had much luck with hyperlinks and stuff seems to disappear too easily so I've set up one ancestry file, within that there are eight folders for each set of great grandparents, each folder has the male surname in caps and the female maiden name in lower case followed by the names of where they were from eg  CARRINGTON Davies MINERA Bangor.

Each of the folders has two subfolders, one for scanned certificates and one for census images.  I name the certificates like this 1890 B (for birth) Robert CARRINGTON, 1912 M (marriage) CARRINGTON Davies and 1960 D (death) xxxx XXXX

With the census images I name the jpegs by the year and then the name & age of the Head of Household.  eg 1901 JOHN CARRINGTON AGE 52 MINERA.  When you close the master Ancestry file all the dates within each folder automatically sort into date order and this makes them easier to find when you reopen the folders.  (Also helps you to recognize right away which years are still missing.)

It seems to work well so far but then have only gone back about 5 generations with about 900 names.  Not sure how well it would work if you had thousands like some lucky people.   I guess the most important thing is to try and be consistent in whatever systems works best for you!

If you have a lot of images all over your computer I have found the best way to organize them all at once is with Picasa2 which is free image organization program from Google.    Once you download and install it it gathers everything together in one place with thumbnails of all the pictures - you can leave everything where it was or reorganize it permanently on the hard drive.

Heather