- Look carefully at all information available
- Decide early (like today) how you are going to keep your information
consider how you keep the rest of your life papers. Are bills in a drawer, a filing cabinet, the corner chair in the DR (or LR), or the dining room table because you always eat in the kitchen? or is every piece of paper instantly digitized and most of your bills arrive electronically? you get the drift. Deciding to use a system that is at odds with the rest of your life will cause GREAT angst.
... however, there are things in genealogy that will arrive or be found on paper.
Deal with it!
and... ps. decide if you will be traveling with the information you have assembled. If so, briefcases, or at least sturdy bags with handles will work better than the dining room table.
- Full recording of where you got the info ("citing your sources") is VERY VERY VERY important -- with a number of conditions.
- the gen community (GC) accepts that books are available many many places. Therefore it is not necessary to tell your readers, through the footnote, at what library you read a given book. You might want to include that info in your research notes so YOU can find it quickly for a re-up on the info, but not for your readers.
- the same exception applies to all newspapers, and all other serial publications which appear on paper. IF/WHEN a publication appears ONLY as a web entity, I take huge numbers of screen shots, because the whole piece may be replaced or edited at any point, and I would rather not fight the "way-back" machine for a copy.
- Why VERY VERY VERY important? Much (most?) genealogical writing today is an equation in words. Is Matthew Smith b. 1832 in Delaware the same Matthew Smith who fought in the Civil War in the New York 3rd Inf. Regiment? or Was John Mayer married to Martha Compton, daughter of Henry and Sara in 1783 or married to Martha Compton, daughter of Robert and Martha in 1784?Another researcher must be able to follow your exact path and have all the material to evaluate whether or not you got to 2+2=4 or if you ended up with 4.5 or 3.75.
Posting for now - think you can comment... shall work on that before next posting.
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in other life - since the last post - LOTS, but the closest to now are 2 GRIP institutes in June/July: Citations with Tom Jones and GERMANY with Amy Arner. good learning and good brain stretching. Also, a trip to Midwest Genealogical Center in Independence, Mo. for research, material for article, and vacation. All three accomplished in style. The article is in the August CAGGNI newsletter. Also, with COVID becoming integrated into the new normal, I am again lecturing in person, and loving it. In the past 2 weeks I've had the pleasure of talking about "Manerva Barbee gets a CW pension (finally)" and "follow the yellow brick road" All great -- and now to do it lots more.