Spring Cleaning your Ancestry Research
Spring Cleaning your Ancestry Research
This winter seemed like it was extra-long, didn’t it? But now that it’s spring, our thoughts naturally turn to taking control of our households, cleaning up, throwing out the unnecessary, and starting fresh. It feels so good! If you’re just getting started with researching your family history or if you’re a seasoned veteran, spring cleaning your ancestry research is a worthwhile project. Here are our three favorite quick-and-dirty tips for tidying up those files.
1. Curate Ancestry Keepers—But Get Real
Start with some hard decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of. This is the satisfying part, but it can also be the most difficult. Chances are good that you’ve been accumulating more photographs or other resources than you need or want.
Make an inventory of everything you’ve hung onto and divide them into different categories:
Keepers: Things you can use for your research and record-keeping
Shareables: Items you may not need but may be of value to someone else in your family
Giveaways: These can include duplicate documents or photos or unidentified items you ended up with. Consider donating giveaways to your local historical society
You won’t feel so overwhelmed by sheer amounts of ancestry stuff once your treasure trove is pared down, and you may even get reacquainted with long-lost important items you’d forgotten you had. Curating your ancestry now makes you a more efficient researcher over the long term.
2. Digitize Ancestry-related Pics and Docs and More!
If your office is cluttered with old photos and documents, this is a great place to start your spring-cleaning efforts. Think of all the space you’ll reclaim! Even more important than tidying the mess is the fact that digitizing helps preserve these precious assets for generations to come and acts as a safeguard against potential loss too. Here are some ideas for things you can digitize:
- Family photos
- Photos of family heirlooms, ancestral homes, and important locations in your family history
- Birth, marriage, and death records
- Video and cassette recordings
A scanner is the best friend of every family-history enthusiast. In case of fire or flood, it’s so much easier to grab your laptop than it is to collect all your paper records. Going digital as much as possible is the wise thing to do.
3. Create an Ancestry Organizational Routine
If you don’t already have one in place, creating an organizational routine makes next year’s ancestry spring cleaning a piece of cake! Create folders on your desktop to temporarily store digital items and dedicate a box in your working area for temporarily store hard-copy resources. You can label them however works best for you, but here are some suggestions:
To-do: Items that need to be labeled, scanned, further researched, etc.
To store: Items that you’re done with that are ready to be filed or otherwise stored
As part of your routine, empty these files or boxes either once a week or once a month. The more you stick to this routine, the less you’ll have to think about it, and before you know it, the process will be automatic. As with most everything else in life, a little work done in small increments helps to mitigate the need for bigger jobs later.
A Final Thought about Spring Cleaning Ancestry
As with most everything else in life, a little work done in small increments helps to mitigate the need for bigger jobs later.
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