Looking for Suggestions on Organising my Data

[Ceryswyn]

Hi everyone.

I've been working on my tree on an off for several years now, but have recently been able to do a lot more off-line digging into things like parish records and such.

Up till now it's been mainly working back through the census's on Ancestry and hoping the best guesses I made were right, but now I'm accumulating a decent sized stack of certificates and photocopies of parish records plus I hope to start adding things like photo's, army and police service records etc to my data soon too.

At the moment I have most of my information stored on Ancestry, but I'd rather not have this be the only place I have my data (though I do have GEDcom backups of course) plus this doesn't include the actual physical papers I have in my possession or my notebooks of notes I've written along the way.

I'd also like to have some kind of visual representation of my tree, even if it were broken up into the smaller family groups, so I can see each relationship instead of the no sibling view ancestry likes to give me.

However I am not the worlds best organiser and I just cannot think of the best way to organise the information I have so that it will be easy to refer to and add to as time passes.

I was contemplating drawing out a tree for each parent/children/grandchildren grouping in the tree, followed by a sheet of paper for each person detailing all the pertinent info I have for them, followed by any more in depth info that I've found. But then how do you organise the people. There just seems to be so many branches off of branches off of branches that I don't know where to start!

Any and all suggestions would be most welcome as I'm at a loss and if I don't organise soon.... It'll be too late   

Helen

[Gaille]

Hi Helen,

I have a 'family file' for each family for my printouts, certs etc to be kept in, each file has the surname on it, and then a family tree for that family drawn out on paper on the front page.

I then have a divider for each person, and add any info I have into their personal divider.

For ease when I am out looking for info I take a general note pad & make all my notes in there, and then transcribe them all into the family files after I am happy they are correct.

I also have a 'cencus book' which i take out with me, its an A5 size with dividers in it for each family, and all the cencus info for each cencus transcribed into it, means I have all the basic info on any family to hand without having to lug loads of books or paper everywhere with me.

Gaille

[Lidfam]

Hi

My suggestion is to do what I have done. Either buy yourself, or download a free, genealogy program (I use the excellent Legacy) and input all your data into that. You build the family tree as you go along, and can print out very good reports, including the actual family tree itself. Crucially, every person you input, gets a unique reference number, and what I have done is to get a card index, along with the box to hold them in, and each person can have their own card, onto which you can write all the facts that is known about that person.
I also have a document folder, and a photograph album, but because these are cross referenced to the card index, with the unique number. they are very easy to find if I am working on particular person.

This system has worked very well for me for many years, but the key to it all is cross referencing. Hope this may give you one or two ideas.

                                                                 Dale