Organisation time!

I'm someone who is a massive fan of organisation so genealogy is a perfect hobby for me as I can split my time between researching and organising!

Today I raided the stationery world and bought index cards, dividers and a box to contain my new system, which consists of index cards and a lever arch folder. Now when I say that, you probably think that's not enough. Well let me explain the whole idea.

At the moment I use Ancestry and their tree to put in all my information. Now ancestry is expensive, so when I return to university next October I probably won't continue the subscription, as the holiday at christmas would be the only time available to do any research.

This means I'm wary of leaving everything on that website should I lose access to the census information, parish records, etc. To combat this I began saving images of the census data for direct relatives, as well as transcribing the info into word. To accompany this I've been writing a document that puts all my research into sentences and adds a bit of flesh and speculation to the dates and places I have discovered.

But again, all of this is on the computer, something which can be quite unfriendly, whether it's as bad as blue screen of death, or something mildly annoying like insisting Heading 3 must be preceded by a page break (this was the irritation that set off my organisation spree).

So while my messy, initial tree will remain on ancestry, and all my documents will be backed up to sites like Dropbox (irritating word file and all), I shall also create an offline, hard copy of my tree, as well as a better, online tree using WikiTree.

My next blog will explain my new system, hopefully with some photos!! Very exciting!