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4/13/2000
Get
It Together
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by Liz Kelley Kerstens, CGRS
This
columns is posted on the Clooz.com Web site with
permission of
MyFamily.com. The
column was originally posted on the Ancestry.com
Web site.
Using a Computer to Organize Your
Genealogical Documents
Discussions in this column in previous weeks have
focused on physically preparing your filing system for the
addition of genealogical records. The next component is
the tracking system that you will use to find your
documents again. You have many options–from low tech to
high tech–to assist with systematically filing your
documents.
Since you’re reading this column online, I’ll
assume that you’ve got a computer and are not interested
in starting a manual system with index cards. If you own
one of the office suites of software, you have the tools
to get started organizing—if you’re a do-it-yourselfer
and you have the time to create your own system. If you’re
not that computer savvy, or don’t want to start from
scratch, you might investigate the possibilities that my
software,
Clooz, provides to
help your system. The key is determining the amount of
effort you’re willing to put in to the creation of a
system, and the amount of information you need out of your
documents.
Clooz is a document-based program. It contains empty
templates for transcribing your census records (whether
they’re from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., or the last two
available Irish censuses), your city directories, all of
your documents (birth, marriage, wills, land, etc.), and
your photos. The templates are designed so you can enter
the pertinent information that will allow you to find the
document again–both in your system and from the
repository where you originally found it. You then link
the people in the document, and enter the details about
each person found in the document. Clooz was designed
primarily as an organizing tool, but once you get data
into the program, you have a research tool to help you
discover the documents you still need to uncover.
You could design similar templates in a spreadsheet or
database program, or even using your word processor. What
makes Clooz unique is that links are formed between people
and the documents they are in, so that you can call up a
report for one person and you’ll see a list of every
document that you’ve entered where you’ve found that
person. Spreadsheets don’t allow for this type of
relational linking, but are still useful for cataloging
information for projects. Databases do allow relational
linking, as Clooz is a database. The average database
user, however, is unfamiliar with how to create these
links and ends up creating what is called a flat-file
database, which looks a lot like a spreadsheet.
As I said earlier, you need to determine how
much information you want out of your documents. If you’re
simply interested in finding a particular document, you
could easily create a cross-reference index to your
documents in a word processor, spreadsheet, or database.
The index would contain columns for the document’s
identification number and a brief description. This then
becomes an electronic version of your index-card system,
although the search features of today’s software will
help you find your documents a lot faster than thumbing
through index cards.
The advantage to at least starting with a
cross-reference index is that you begin to get your
documents organized. Organizing twenty years’ worth of
genealogical research can be a monumental task, and making
progress on getting the documents in order will enhance
your research abilities. If you create your own system,
and then decide it’s not comprehensive enough, you can
later switch to something with more capability.
As always, getting started is the difficult part. If
you’re still looking at stacks of unorganized documents,
look back through the
"Get
It Together" archive
for help in getting those
stacks into more manageable piles so you can start your
index.
Elizabeth Kelley
Kerstens, CGRS,
is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing,
editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’
newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the
electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, and a
frequent contributor to Ancestry. She can be
reached via e-mail at liz@ancestordetective.com.
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