Get It Together 

March 2, 2000

By Liz Kelley Kerstens, CGRS

This column is posted on the Clooz.com Web site with permission of MyFamily.com. The column was originally posted on the Ancestry.com Web site.

Tackle Your Genealogical Documents

The organizing discussion in previous weeks has deliberately avoided the topic of genealogical records. I’ve done this because often our organizing dilemmas are more systemic than just pertaining to filing our genealogical documents. Therefore, I have tried to build a foundation for better organizing practices in your home or office before getting specific.

Now it’s time to tackle your genealogical documents. I have learned, from talking with hundreds of attendees at my organizing lectures and Clooz customers, that we all suffer from the same problem when it comes to our family papers. The more involved we get into researching, the more paper we acquire–and sometimes the stacks grow exponentially! There are a variety of ways that you can organize these documents. Some online suggestions can be found at:

You can get some further ideas about the methods that I suggest from a past Clooz Newsletter posted at http://ancestordetective.com/121198.htm#Organizing.

There are many people who file their genealogical documents by surname. I started out filing in this manner. When I had only collected a few ancestors, I had a folder for each surname. After I had collected a larger number, I changed the folders so they pertained to each couple in my direct line. Within the folders I kept all of the documents that related to those people. It didn’t take me long, however, to find that this system was very flawed. There are some types of documents that contain references to multiple people, such as marriage records, wills, land transactions, etc. I found that if I wanted to be able to find these documents, I needed to make duplicate copies for the various folders or put a piece of paper in the folder referencing where the original document is filed. Filing the documents by couple, or by surname, complicated the picture because the documents crossed surnames or generations.

About thirteen years ago I completely rearranged my genealogical filing system by event rather than by surname. The advantage to this method is that the event takes priority over the people involved, eliminating redundancy in your filing system. In order to use a system like this, however, you need to number each of your documents and, at a minimum, create a cross-reference index to the people contained in the documents.

To get started, sort your documents into piles by event type. For instance, all the marriage records go in one stack, the wills in another stack, census records go in a third stack, and birth records go in a fourth stack. You can separate your census records further by state if you want, but you don’t need to divide them any further than that. You’re going to give each document a number based on the event type, such as Marriage 001, Birth 001, Death 001. You number them in the order that you pick them up, not worrying about putting them in any particular order, i.e. by date or place of event. If you put them in chronological order, the system would fall apart as soon as you get a document with a date prior to your last document in that series.

Don’t write on the documents, especially if they are originals. Instead, you might consider purchasing top-loading sheet protectors and putting labels on the outside top corners. I keep my documents in binders by document type. I have binders for birth, baptism, marriage, death, cemetery, military, immigration/naturalization, letters, newspaper items, land transactions, bible records, and what I call "book"–items found in books of which I’ve copied only a few pages.

If you’re progressing well and want to continue, you can download the Clooz Manual to read more about getting your documents prepared for filing. Otherwise, check back here in coming weeks for more tips on organizing your genealogical documents.

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Original Article on ancestry.com