Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

[Avbill]

Is there a video out there showing how to organzine your genealogical data?

Thank you.

Bill

[kmgenealogy]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

Is there a video out there showing how to organzine your genealogical data?

Thank you.

Bill

Hi Bill,

I highly recommend Ben Sayer's website for his 9-part video tutorials on how to organize genealogy on your Mac computer. I started using his system years ago and am very satisfied. Like anything else, throughout the years I've tweaked it to satisfy my desires. I keep the MY FAMILY HISTORY folder in the Finder "Favorites" sidebar which makes it very handy.

To get to these videos, go to http://genealogytools.com/toolbox/ and scroll down to "Setup Folders on Your Computer". You'll see links to the 9 parts.

One suggestion...do not watch all the videos at once! Watch a video and then do the set up before going on to the next video. Otherwise, you will be overwhelmed!

Have you done a search on "organizing" or something similar? Others will make suggestions or point you to other threads that have covered this. Take time to follow-up. You will find many helpful suggestions, hints, etc.

Hope this is helpful!

[gcase]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

I also agree with Kaye.

I followed Ben Sayer's method and am very satisfied on how my documents are stored on the hard drive. I also tweaked on some of his methods.

After entering about 500 source citations I just didn't like the way my documents were stored. It took some time for me to convert to the new method and I'm glad I did !

[Avbill]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

To Gcase:

What did you do different with your sources?

thanks bill

[Bob White]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

Is there a video out there showing how to organzine your genealogical data? ..... Thank you.......Bill

Each of us is a little different in the way our brains work when it comes organizing and then finding what we organized at a later date. I suggest that you look at how you have organized other things and remember what works well and what doesn't.

Ben has a good system and so do several other authors. Look at them all but devise something that works for you. Also, my experience is that the filing system does not need to be perfect. Why? Because the great majority of items I have either in my Mac or on paper rarely get a second look.

[gcase]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

Bill

For example - my grand father Wilhelm David Weber would be stored as this on my hard drive:

Weber, Wilhelm David 1875-1927

Under this directory I would have the following documents: Census, birth, death, burial etc ...

A census entry would look like this:

< Name > < Event > < Place > <Source Id >
Weber, David - 1920 US Census - Columbus, Franklin Co., Ohio - S1

< Name > - The name field is recorded as is in the document
< Event > - 1920 US Census
< Place > - City, County and State where the event took place:
< Source Id > - This matches the source Id that is stored in Reunion.

What happened after 20 some documents, the directory listing was sorted by < Name >. I found that that my Grandfather's last name was also spelled like WEBBER and WEAVER.

All I did was change my documents to this pattern:
< Year > < Name > < Event > < Place > <Source Id >
1920 Weber, David - US Census - Columbus, Franklin Co., Ohio - S1

Now my documents are listed by the <Year> and than <Name> and now I can quickly see what is missing.

It may seem like a lot of typing for the document name but this suites me.

[mrstucci]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

I'd like to suggest a Facebook page, The Organized Genealogist. Lots of great ideas! I am still working on how I want to organize my genealogy.... Getting there. It's slow. But I am making progress! Judy

[Michael Talibard]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

For whatever it's worth, here's what I do:

[Bob White]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

A picture is worth many words.... I organize by family names...

[donworth]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

And mine... (I have lost directory structure when I have moved from one computer to another sometimes in the past, so I don't rely on using a lot of directories - I encode everything in the file names and count on either the sort of the filenames or Spotlight to find things quickly)

[Susan Freas Rogers]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

Mine looks very much like Bob White's, see image. One difference is that I have four main sub-groups labeled by the surname of each grandparent, as I think it helps keep it all more manageable. My paper-filing system is the color-coded-by-four-grandparents system (red, yellow, blue, or green for their lines) so this is parallel with that, and I always know whose line someone is in. Some things to note:

-- to force direct-line ancestor surnames (Bailey to Wolf) to the top, I insert one blank space in front of the folder name. Notice that Goverts, etc. down to Zeitler toward the bottom are not alphabetized with the rest. The lower ones are spouse records, i.e. not related by blood.

-- I create sub-folders under each surname so there's a specific place to toss stuff that I have to do but haven't done yet. This particular Freas folder has way more subfolders than the rest of my lines because it's my maiden name, but for many surnames I have at least a "[surname] research" subfolder, so I have a place I can put SnagIt image clips and documents somewhere until I get around to focusing on that surname.

-- birth years are included immediately after the Last/First name if there are duplicate names. I do like Bob's style of not putting a space between Last and First names.

-- FWIW, the "-inR" at the end of a filename used to mean "this file is linked to the person in Reunion," but I gave up on that quite awhile back. Not sure why I stopped, it did help me track what I had linked and what I had not linked yet.

[kmgenealogy]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

Here's what mine looks like. The color-dots are tags for my main family lines. Still need to update older entries.

[sgtbob]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

I've been viewing the Ben Sayer videos and find them to be most interesting. I am curious about how the filing system dovetails with REUNION. How does one address the files in Reunion - a separate entry for Places, then one for people and then the documents that pertain to a number of folks? I'm trying to figure if I would benefit from re-visiting all my 2000 sources and 5000+ photos for the 29K people in my Reunion file. To re-arrange all those files appears to be pretty intensive. Pointers and suggestions?

[Bob White]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

My numbers are way smaller than yours. However, I have converted filing systems several times over maybe 25 years of doing genealogy. The answer is do a few existing items everyday and put all new items in the new filing system. A few months sail by in no time and you find that you are all done.

[sgtbob]

Re: Organizing your genealogical data on your Mac

So - do you then enter each file folder in the Multimedia Files Preference? This could be a large number of files if I understand Ben Sayre's methodology.