It started with a book
It started with a book my great-aunt gave me. It was a book about her father’s side of the family. On the cover was this image of the original farmstead. Inside were photographs and biographies of ancestors and distant relations going back to the 1830s or so.
I now have copies of death certificates and court documents, transcribed wills, more photographs, and family trees going back to the 1500s.
I need to sort it all out. I have a mess of links and documents, and I have all sorts of pedigree charts for people I think are my ancestors. I need to figure out who these people are, if they are my ancestors, and if so, then I want to try and find out what their life was like.
My first step is to organize all of those resources. I’m going to create folders on my computer and start saving images and text to them. I’m also going to create bookmarks in my browser, organized by surname or genealogy topic. I’ve heard that a lot of personal genealogy sites have a way of disappearing, so I’ll also backup html files on my computer when I find something relevant to an ancestor I’m researching. I’m also not going to let any URL go un-bookmarked as I’d already discarded several URLs as irrelevant until later, I realized those WERE relevant to some aspect of my research.
Once I’ve got that organized, I’ll move on and start organizing my pedigree charts with some good genealogy software. But we will get to that later.
[...] is time for me to get serious about learning who my ancestors were. As I mentioned previously, I have too many names, dates, URLs, records, etc for me to continue with handwritten notes. I [...]