Part 1

The name of tonight’s class is Piles O' Paper.

There are a few hints that began to show up even before people began to recognize what is happening to them. The mailman has become your favorite visitor... You begin to speak in abbreviations and initials...Your cousin answers the phone with “oh, it's you, I thought I had told you everything I know”...You begin to eat meals on TV trays as all the table tops have become filled with piles of data. On vacations you note all county-line changes, and your children are telling their summer vacation stories in school by describing cemeteries in far away places, and they all ace the assignments in Family History classes. Lets Fact it folks, you have become addicted with the genealogy bug - a condition that often lasts a lifetime and becomes an obsession. For any of you that might be new to the hobby, Leave your computer NOW as you are in danger of losing your life to PILES OF PAPER. When people first get interested in their family history, they are not fully prepared for what is about to happen to them. Genealogy is an addiction. New hobbyists discover that they now have to do this for the rest of their lives and the first few weeks can turn perfectly normal people into compulsive, determined zealots with only one thing on their mind---get that genealogy stuff It has caused husbands to go night after night without their dinner, children are left to fend for themselves, and you may find yourself wandering courthouses and cemeteries, with a bemused look on your face muttering, I know it's here, I just know it's here If however, you have been at this awhile, I am going to try and give you some hints to recover your home, tabletops, husbands, etc. from the invasion of paper - more commonly known as DOCUMENTS. Putting aside the most irritating aspect of this hobby - discovering that some of your relatives really WERE found in the cabbage patch, and came full blown into your family tree - one of the most common problems that happen to researchers is trying to deal with the stacks of paper that began to collect. As they grow, you move them first to a 3-ring notebook, then a file tray, then several file trays, to a file cabinet - perhaps several cabinets, and as in my case - sometimes a whole room of your house can become dedicated to housing this collection. This room I loosely call my office. You can begin to spend more time looking through your piles, trying to find something you already know you have, than it took to research the material in the first place. You may like the idea of dumping the whole mess in the middle of your room, and piece by piece - picking them up, sorting them out, seeing what is there and attempting to pick up and identify what you have in that pile, but lets discuss some things a person can do to stop the runaway piles. Probably, when you began, you started by putting everything you have in one neat binder. Soon it grew to several binders, and then the cabinets...you already know the rest. When you began you could house the small collection of marriage cert. photos, pedigree charts, family group sheets, notes you have taken, census copies, etc. together in the same small notebook This way of keeping notes will work fine, for the first few years of searching. However, after you have been at this for a number of years, that pile of documents will grow into a very large pile. You will find that, it can, however, usually be separated into three general categories, and that is the first step to becoming organized. The first category will have the notes and documents that you have collected and will be the largest pile of your collection. It is the heart of your research and consists of photocopies of pages of books, copies of census records, birth cert., licenses, deeds, and land records, etc. In other words the raw data of your research, and this pertains to all of your families and many different surnames. The nature of this category has to do with the WAY we do research on our ancestry. We identify historical events for each person - yes, EACH person - who appears on our pedigree charts. First information is gathered about an individual and then recorded, in the form of these notes and documents. Usually a person then creates a family group sheet and pedigree chart, putting what the facts are in some sort of readable presentation. This represents what we have gathered and form the general basis of our family tree. Facts gained in this research generally are oriented towards one person - with the collection of facts about that person's life, or the genealogical records of a single person. Of course, we want to then link these separate single people. As a member of which family, to whom was he/she married, the bloodline connection to his parents, grandparents, and so on. But the presentation that the group sheet and pedigree line deal with, must first, began with the gathering of the documentation of each individual. And is probably the most significant and important part of your research. This documentation must identify the significant, genealogical milestones for individuals. From this collection of facts, a family can be put together, and the pedigree charts extended. The first significant milestone of a person's life begins with his birth. A date and place of birth is followed by a date and place of marriage. and ends with a date and place of death and burial. In between these events - the vital statistics of each individual are the events that make up a person's life. These include the recorded events - which includes anything that happened in a person’s life that can be recalled - from memory or written accounts. Some examples are a baptism, confirmation, or any event that happens in a persons life that may be recorded in history for some deed - good and bad. The day someone enters school, graduates, gives birth, pays taxes, buys land are all examples of genealogical events. And obituary - WHERE YOU ARE MENTIONED AS A SURVIVOR - is a genealogical event - perhaps confirming a date and place where a person lived, as well as the relationship you had to the Deceased. ANY written account of a person, however slight, is a Genealogical event -and adds knowledge about an individual’s life. All along the timeline of a person's life, are events that confirm that a person lived in a certain place at a certain and particular time. It is a listing, in chronological order of all the events (ideally) in a person's life, and if, in fact such a timeline were possible - it would give a biographical account of a person's day to day existence, plus it would identify all the places a person lived. Such a listing is NOT possible., in fact, unless someone has kept a detailed diary entree for each day of a lifetime. But still - that being said, many of the recorded events of a person’s life exist and a record of their attendance - or the record of the first piece of land a person owned is detailed in a land record in a county courthouse. The researchers

job is to identify these recorded events, and gather the facts, much as a detective would use. Doing this effectively, can easily create a category of papers, which grows extremely large. This first category can be called your database. This is a paper database of facts about your ancestors. For this, no computer is required --- not yet anyway. After separating out this set of papers, your goal should be to have every fact you have ever found on your ancestors in one group and you could call these your Notes and Documentation. If you have facts in your memory that you haven't taken time to write down, now is the time to do that. Fill in holes that you can on county identifiers. The significant facts on your children - for instance the godparents at their baptisms, schools attended. Also note the places you have resided and if possible - the years. Do this in your own handwriting, or typing and on the same machine - as later this will be the thing future people will need to verify that this is indeed your information given by you. This category of information is going to be your complete database of information. Later we are going to organize it in such a manner, that you will be able to find any particular piece of paper in seconds!!!! For now - just get every one of the sheets of paper that belong in this category, separated from the other two categories I will be talking about. Okay, The second category we will address tonight is your compiled sheets. These include any family group sheets, pedigree charts, surname lists, descendancies or any compiled genie information that derives from different sources - this does include those you compile yourself, or any you have pulled from the computer resources available today - also any copies you may have been sent, or received BY OTHER RESEARCHERS. YOU, however, will have compiled most of these papers. These are different - because they are compiled sheets, not ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS, or notes you collect. If you want to organize them, they should first be separated from our first pile of Notes and Documents. Dealing with these papers to be separated into the Compiled Sheets category will not be difficult. You can put family group sheets in one notebook, or file folder, for example. The same is possible with pedigree charts and descendancies. Perhaps create a file folder or notebook for your surnames - listing them as Smith - Jones - Anderson , and put the documents in there. But you cannot organize these types of records very well, if they are inter-filed with the other categories. This may well be your easiest category to tackle, and you may want to work on it first. You could also choose to put them in categories such as family group sheets, pedigree charts, etc., remembering that these compiled forms are NOT original documents. Now at this point - and you have finished this category, take your kids or yourself and your hubby out to Kentucky Fried Chicken to celebrate this incredible achievement. Plan to ignore that still sizeable pile of paper you still have waiting for you to tackle. The third category we will talk about tonight could be titled Aids to Research. It does not, necessarily give the names of people, but it is definitely important to your research projects, because it includes the how to items. Lists of libraries, maps, lists of professional genealogists, societies, clubs, commercial vendors, vital records clerks, and a collection of your web sites that you mean to explore.

This category would also include your growing collection of books, if any - pertaining to research. It would also include articles or other research aides collected from newsletters and magazines. If you subscribe regularly to any family historical societies or newsletters, you may want to include photocopies of articles in your files, and store the actual magazines and books in a more convenient manner. These types of research aids are not difficult to identify and organize. You can easily start file folders to collect all the things that may relate to Minnesota, for instance and label it Minnesota (duh). You will find that this category will be the easiest of all to organize. It can easily be referred to as your personal library, of research helps. Often the easiest way of all to organize these is by geographical location. But this is not a hard and fast rule. Any way of labeling these is correct, if you find it easy to use. When you have finished with this category, and I would HIGHLY recommend that you complete categories two and three before tackling the Notes and Documents category - you will find yourself sill looking at one large pile of papers. In fact, it may be nearly impossible to sort out your notes and documents without first completing the work on the other two. In order to do this correctly and without tearing out all your remaining hair - don’t attempt to do this in a single day or maybe even in a single week. Take your time. Throw as you go. Anything that is incorrect, outdated, and useless. Determine the manner you choose to store items such as photographs, or truly valuable pieces of paper, much as the deed to your farm. You may decide to photocopy or scan these papers to keep a copy in your documentation, and keep the originals in some other safe manner. Oh - and by the way, the last category would be where you would keep articles on reservation techniques for these articles - and other things, such as hot to use Soundex classes, or good cemetery etiquette classes. Because of the amount of class time remaining. I will attempt to demonstrate some techniques for the care and feeding of our largest category, the Notes and Documents - and the area with the largest amount of paper - in our next class. This category of paper is also the one you have a great deal of time and money spent in locating, and it pays to go over it very carefully. Hope you all can join me next Thursday - same time and same Bat channel. Thanks to you guys for coming and can I answer any questions for anyone at this point?