How are you organizing the digital media that you are gathering in your genealogy
research? Is it simple yet robust?
well a Family History Fanatics community
member asked me about my digital file organization system and we're going to
talk about that next
Howdy, I'm Devon Noel Lee and this is Family History
Fanatics. If this is your first time here welcome
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today's question comes from one of our viewers who wanted me to show a little
more details about my file organization system that she spied in the video about
five reasons why I love RootsMagic
well thank you for asking let's dive in now
many of you really love organization but for me I'm not that
I like things to be organized
but I don't love organizing does that make sense
so the simpler my organization system is
the happier I am and
the more likely I am to use that program
in the past when I learned about organizing digital files I was given the
recommendation to create a spreadsheet
I was going to give some kind of strange
code to my images
then I was going to create a column in this spreadsheet that
identified the names of all the people that were in that strangely identified
code name for an image
and then I was going to describe it like you see here
what I soon found out is this is really complicated overly complicated
unnecessarily complicated
As soon as I lose this spreadsheet file I'm toast
so I need to put something identifying into my images so that I don't
lose data if I ever lose the backup file
which is another reason why I'm a big fan
of creating photo books caption photo
book or scrapbooks where the photos and the stories always stay together
but I digress
how do I organize my digital files
well before I go to my system I want to tell you about someone
else that we've had on our channel before - Randy Seaver
now Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has his own file organization
system his is more robust from mine so I'll go ahead and tell you just a brief
introduction to his system be sure to check the description for a link to the
blog post of which covers all of the details about his organization system
I don't want to say don't like his his one just doesn't work for me I'll show you
mine after I give you a quick introduction into his
now Randy organizes his files according to families
after he organizes data into family files
then he goes and breaks it into documents genealogy
reports and then into photographs and then finally he has a file naming
structure that you can see in his blog post of how he identifies his photos
It has a lot of data in it and it works for him I will give you a caveat
the files that I have are small and number simply because my family was much smaller so I
didn't inherit a lot so if you have a larger family with a lot of data to keep
track up this is definitely a system that I think is valuable so I want to go
ahead and advise you to check it out now let's examine that file naming system
he puts the name at the key people in his file name then the date then the record
type and then any other information
pretty handy unfortunately one of the
things that I discovered is that I like to sort my photos by chronological order
I can't quickly do that if I don't put
then date first in my file naming structure
so let me show you my strategy
the first thing I do because I really just have two branches I have mom's line
and dad's line
now eventually mom's dying and dad's line is gonna become
somebody's Grandma and Grandpa
but for now this makes a whole lot of sense for me
under mom's line and dad's line I have two major photos folders I have
documents and I have photos where Randy had the genealogy reports I would just
take those and put them under documents again it just makes things more simple
for me but I don't think there's anything wrong with that
within the documents folder under mom's folder
as well as dad's Branch I have the record
type so all the birth records are together all the church records together
and so on and so forth I'll show you an example here in a moment and then I name
my file differently depending on if it's a document or if it's an image of people
in places and things so if it's a document then the file name will have
the surname of the key individual and then their given name and then I just
put in the type of record at the end so you'll show you an example
Brown Samuel and then the type of record and I had codes MC marriage record EC
death certificate CD city directory and so on and so forth
if it is a couple then I will put the husband's last name the husband's first
name and then I'll go ahead and put the wife's name after so let me go ahead and
show you a live example here you have one of the branches of my family tree
and the various records that I have within that file folder now if you have
different types of records you can have extra folders pertaining to those
records so if you have pension files can add a folder for that if you
have occupational records you can have the folders you have folders based on
the content that you have for the family they you are blessed with their
documents of what I'm trying to say is don't create an empty folder create
folders as you need them now within the folder I then show you all of the images
these are death certificates yeah those are death certificates and as you can
see I have two last name the first name and then the dc for death certificate now
with photos my process is a little bit different because again I don't have a
huge collection to maintain I do group things by family if there is enough to
break out to create a folder from so I have a lot of photos from my parents so
they will be a family folder but as you'll see in a moment if I have the
surname Marvin and I have 10 pictures of Marvin's
I'm not gonna create Marvin John Marvin Ralph I'm just gonna create Marvin so if
a family group has enough photos to warn its own folder then I go ahead and break
it out then you have the question of I have my dad and I have myself so you
have a parent and you have a child When does do I as an individual become
have photos for myself do I have it all of the photos for myself or part of them
with my family of my parents well the answer is when I'm a child my photos are
with my parents when I get married I start my own folder so let me show you a
quick example I have Robert and Penny Geiszler, Robert and Helen Geiszler
Zumstein Robert and Clementine but since I don't have enough photos for Marvin's
and Claybaughs they don't get their own folder and with the file name structures
again I want to have the year the month the day and then a description to go
with it because what I found is I can solve genealogy mysteries in photographs
when I sort photographs according to the chronological order so an example would
be something that looks like this you see the year you see the month new day
if you don't have the day just stop at the month if you don't have the month
and the day just stop at the year and then sometimes you have to put 1940s
because it's your best guess for that family at that time period and that is
perfectly acceptable so here is like an example this is my photographs you can
see a number of the families that I have broken out but then you also see the
Zumstein file where there is just not a lot of photographs to break out then within
some of the families I have a child under that family and maybe have 10 or
15 photographs but I don't have enough to create a whole separate George
Geisler and his wife Helen folder I just put them under his father with his wife
his mother Evelyn it's not a perfect system but it works for me and the
reason why it works for me is because in that previous video about RootsMagic
RootsMagic organizes a lot of my media files
scrapbooks organize my media files and so do sharing my photos on Family Search
at a different site so the question of the day is how do you organize your
media files are you more like Randy Seaver are you more like me where you
have it adapt to meet your needs or do you have something entirely different
I can't wait to hear what you use or any further questions you have in the
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