The large piles of ice covered snow in my yard notwithstanding, the calendar tells me the vernal equinox was yesterday. And that means time for spring cleaning...including the vast piles of genealogical notes and scribbles accumulated over this most miserable winter.
I thought this would be a good time for a general brainstorming session about ways to organize data--especially since my own participation will be a little sporadic until I get home from work.
Genealogy & Family History Community
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When you are trying to make sense of a particular ancestor's personal story, it helps to put the elements of that story into a larger context ... what was going on in the community/country/world at that time? Who were the political leaders? What sort of technology/conveniences were available? What were the popular books/music? Back in my grade school years ... that murky, unsophisticated pre-personal computer era ... history teachers loved to assign timelines to achieve that sort of context. GAH!
Well, not exactly GAH! There was a certain beauty in the orderly progression of events mapped out on a horizontal line--it was having to create the frickin' things armed only with a ruler and a cantankerous old BIC pen that made me want to shriek GAH! Leave something out? Start over! Misspell a word? Start over! Manage to remember everything and spell it correctly, but misjudge the amount of space needed to make it legible? Cry! And start over!
These days, I can pull up a template on my computer:
sample timeline template in excel
or these widgets:
which make timelines a snap.
But in order to enter data on these templates, you still need to sort out your notes in a coherent manner. Remember index cards? Those little cardboard notes that you could categorize facts by card color, and merge manually by date? Well you can do something similar in excel (or any similar spreadsheet program), and you don't have to worry about desktop clutter.
So, for purposes of this diary, I've decided to put my g-grandfather Cal into context with his father, his oldest child, U.S. history, world history, cultural history, and technology. I set up an excel workbook with a worksheet for each of those categories:
naming the excel worksheets
In order to keep data straight at the time I'm entering it, I like to assign a different background color to each worksheet--but that is not necessary. Whatever works best for you.
(BTW, I have Office 2007 at home, but Office 2010 is more or less the same. If you have an older computer with Microsoft Works, you have to create a separate document for each of the categories; I'm not sure how the "excel starter" program on newer computers works, so feel free to chime in if you know.)
Next, I decide on some standard column headings ... since I want to be able to combine and sort info from all categories, the column headings need to be the same on each of the sheets:
simple column headings
In the column labled "type" I enter the name of the category I'm working on: thus, if I'm entering data on the "technology history" sheet, I will enter "tech" into the "type" column...this may seem tedious, but ther reasoning will become clear later.
Now it is time to start actually entering the data. Don't worry too much about getting things in the "wrong" order, as you can always do a data sort later (which is nice because research does not ever happen in chronological fashion).
initial data entry
Next, I copy and paste information from each of the categories onto the sheet I created for my g-grandfather. Now that I have kind of a mess, I do a data sort by year and month, which looks something like this:
sort commands in excel
This gives me a sort of timeline, where it is clear how each of my "facts" fit into a larger context:
Final sorted version in excel
I know this is a little hard to read, so here is a somewhat magnified view:
magnified detail
And here is how the data sort looks in Microsoft works:
ms works sort commands
how the final sort looks in ms works
A key point here is that the non-genealogical data you enter can be used for other individuals from different family lines--you would just sort out the years you want to use for any particular individual. Maybe you'd rather keep all those items in a single worksheet of historical events--as long as you fill in a consistent notation in the "type" column it should work just fine.
Anyway, these are just some ideas to get the conversation started. What are some of your strategies to keep your notes straight?