HOW DO YOU MANAGE YOUR DOCUMENTS? DO I NEED ALL THIS PAPER?

I have been doing genealogy for 6 years and have 2 bookcases full of paper. I have 3 main families I am researching and have a set of binders for each one. Within each family set of binders there are newspaper articles, vital records, census records, court records, naturalization/immigration okay you get the idea. I have my tree information on Ancestry.com as well as my hard drive via Family Tree Maker and have been scanning documents to a separate drive and uploading them to the correct person within Ancestry. I have a subscription with Ancestry that backs up all my information.

Very few of my documents are originals with about 90% of them being copies. Yes, I paid money for those copies, but DO I NEED TO KEEP ALL OF THIS PAPER? What do you do? I am interested in peoples opinions and then will go from there!

If you keep all the paper, how do you keep it?

I work for a major insurance carrier and we are paperless and I have become very used to that and then come home to my hoards and hoards of paper and think HMMM.

Thanks for your time

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Permalink Reply by Sally Brockman on August 2, 2009 at 6:34pm

I have my papers in binders by "type" then in alpha order ie binders for Death records, Census records etc. I also keep copies of my docs on my hard drive and imbedded the images in Family Tree Maker. I like both sources of information. Most of my research has been online so I'm not up to a bookcase full as you are - if I get to that point, I'm thinking bye-bye binders!

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Permalink Reply by Audrey Staples on August 2, 2009 at 8:25pm

I have two large shelves (a large wall) full of binders and photo albums. I have been involved with family history since I was a kid visiting cemeteries with my grandparents (forty years ago). I have all family names separated in binders and all the data and photos in plastic sleeves in the binders. It has taken me ten years to go through my grandmother's things, resort them out and take them out of magnetic albums. Most of my stuff is 'hard-copy' but I am starting the long process of digitizing (sp?) everything. My main objection is to preserve the original things in archival manner, then to keep up with adding new information using the best means to preserve it for future generations. My advise is to preserve originals and keep backups in another location. The things that you can look up again, such as census records - keep them in digital format and not print them off? Would you be comfortable throwing away the paper that you had copied to your hard drive or backup cd/dvd? Would your information be easier to look it up on the computer or the binder?

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Permalink Reply by Paul Drake on August 3, 2009 at 8:06am

Most of us have been there and had the same problem :-(

I scanned new writings and also my papers that I thought REALLY necessary; saved each scan to my CD drive, kept all originals, and threw away what was left. Though it was a pain in the you-know-what, years ago I commenced sorting my family by starting a manilla file for EVERY marriage (even if I did not have any facts - I knew the missing family member had a marriage or at was a child of the ancestor of whom I had SOME information - and when the info I had gathered was needed I referred to the CD with some minimal clue to what file the new information was placed.

Tedious, but at least you will have a paper copy, Be sure to print out each scan, file it in the marriage file to which it has relevance, and label that print-out file in a very brief way, again in chronological order. I print only whatever I thought important at the time, and with a CD copy of what you thought was of lesser importance, you will again still have that (till the disc fails, that is).

Paul.

Paul. .