Part 2 Avoiding Information Overload

For some people organizing is the most difficult part of the research process. Don’t let it scare you. The first step of organizing your ancestry is determining your goals. If you don’t know where you are headed, then how can you get there? Determining your goals will help you focus on what is important.

• Do you want just birth dates, death dates, marriages?
• Do you want to know about who they were? What they did? Activities?
• Do you want to know just the direct family members (parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc)? or
• Do you also want to know about their children and their families?
• Do you want living relatives.
• How many generations do you want to know about?

Now with a goal in mind, you can start the actual organization process. Some people prefer to organize the old fashion way (paper and pencil) and others prefer to organize using software or other technology. I like to use both and will get into different recording techniques in a later article.

The next thing I do when I start a family tree is create a pedigree chart. A pedigree chart is an outline of the direct family members. You can get some preprinted pedigree charts online by doing a search. Cyndi’s List has some listed on her website. Fill out the chart as best you can. You may not know a lot of the information. That is okay. I like to have this chart so I can quickly see who the major players are in the family at a glance.

I then color code my families. I assign a color to an individual or a particular surname. You can use a highlighter, marker, crayon or colored pencil to give that family a color.

I have divided my information as follows:

• Color 1: Mom’s mother Surname Blum
• Color 2: Mom’s father Surname Jonas
• Color 3: Dad’s mother Surname Radej/Radey
• Color 4: Dad’s father Surname Chaloupka

Almost everyone has some sort of document or photos or something they want to keep in a physical form. I then invest in some water tight plastic storage bins. Good sturdy ones are worth the investment. They will help protect your paper copies and photos from damage. Also, get some colored tape or labels and label the storage container with the family color. Masking tape and markers works okay too. If your budget permits, you may also want to invest in matching colored file folders and/or binders.

Next put all the notes, photos, family trees, documents, bibles etc. that you have on that surname or person and place it in a storage container. Don’t take the time to organize it within the bin, just put it in and put on the lid.

As time permits, you can take out a bin, one at a time, and deal with its contents. It should be less intimidating when you take out the box, because it will be focusing on only one family tree topic. If you still have too much, you may need to divide it once more.

Organizing the contents of the bin will be the topic of a later article.