Here’s a pdf of Ron’s presentation, and as always, I’m rather bemused to see myself showing up in the FamilySearch materials.

Here’s a resource that someone mentioned on Twitter: RecordSeek. I’ve used it, but not extensively. It aggregates information from all over the web to add to your family tree.

And that’s the very latest on FamilySearch Family Tree.

It appears that there is still much to be done before Family Tree can be released to the general public and newFamilySearch closed down, but I am glad that they are trying to get it right instead of rushing ahead with a product that still has many problems to be resolved.

There is another feature to use to create source of any site outside of FamilySearch. It is called Tree Connect by Record Seek. It is a fanastic one. Do not use it within FamilySearch Historical Collection having no indexes because the source didn’t come out quite right. FamilySearch Source Box has a way to do it right within.

back to Watch List, if it is any indication, not much traffic unless it’s a sore person.

It is serendipitous or funny (or something) that Mat would raise the question about Source Box because I read something on Genealogy’s Star about it just this morning. (How to add sources to FamilySearch Family Tree.)

Evidently you can put up to 10,000 sources in your SourceBox. You can group the sources into folders. I just moved a bunch of my Tanner files into a separate folder. But at some point your Source Box will get unwieldy, and it would be better to have other solutions, such as the one I outlined in the previous comment.

There are a number of different schools of thought on how to organize digital files. This is what I do with my personal information, and I do something similar with my other research projects.

I keep folders on my hard drive, one for the family of each of my grandparents: Tanner, Morgan, Wessman, and Glade.

Within those folders, I have folders for each ancestor or ancestral family line with subfolders in each of those like “Census,” “Newspaper,” or “Photos.” When I find sources on FamilySearch or elsewhere, I download a copy and put it in the correct folder and subfolder and change the file name to reflect its contents and source. For example: “1942.01.26ElizabethPugsleyHaywardDeathCertUTArchv.jpg.”

And then (and I am trying to get better about doing this 100 percent of the time) I open my research log for the person or family in question and enter the source information for each new source.

I previously kept research logs in text documents, but I’ve switched over to using Evernote since I can access that information just about anywhere.

One other thing I didn’t mention in this article is that when I work on someone’s entry, I also have Ancestry open, to help identify other sources there. I try to make sure all sources are in both family trees.

Theoretically I should copy all my work over into my RootsMagic and Reunion files, but there’s a limit to how much effort I can put into this project. (If anyone wanted to pay me to do my own family history I would of course meet the highest standards of genealogical professionalism. ) (That would include compiling exhaustive research logs with notes about every source consulted and traveling around the world to find sources in the pertinent locations. “I dreamed a dream in time gone by…”)

I do need to get better at taking my collections of sources and converting them into useable form like Kevin mentioned yesterday in a post on this blog. (The Search for Edward Arthur Smith.)

And, don’t forget to have a backup for your files! Either make sure your computer backs up automatically to an external high-capacity hard drive, or use an online backup service.

The first issue that Mat’s question brings up is that of ownership of work on Family Tree. How do you keep track of your work?

On Wikipedia, you can look at your account and see a list of all the edits you’ve done. Unless you keep notes separately, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent feature in Family Tree. The closest thing is to add each entry to your Watch List, but that could get unwieldy after awhile.

And of course the real answer to the question of ownership of Family Tree corrections is that it’s a wiki, with all the messy complications that ensue, so a family tree may never be perfectly corrected and documented. I tried to capture a flavor of this in the post, leaving an edit undone, since I am by nature a perfectionist.

And that leads to the next point…

The first is about ownership of work on Family Tree. The second is about preserving sources. The third is about Source Box itself.

(And of course it should go without saying that this is all my opinion and what I’ve found to work in my particular situation.) (Well, all of it except keeping backups of your work. That’s common sense.)