The following article was written by my good friend, by William Dollarhide.
Dollarhide’s Genealogy Rule No. 1: Treat the brothers and sisters of your ancestors as equals . . . even if some of them were in jail.
In the article, “Piles of Paper, Part 1,” we left you with a large pile of paper in the middle of your kitchen. We identified three categories of paper and tried to separate all the paper into three piles: 1) The notes and documents; 2) The compiled sheets, and 3) the research aids. After removing the compiled sheets such as family group sheets and pedigree charts from the large pile, we were able to organize this category. The family group sheets can all go in one ring binder or file folder. The same is true for pedigree charts. In addition, we removed all the research aids into another pile of paper, which was easily organized by location. For example, all the papers related to research in Ohio went in a file folder marked “Ohio,” which seemed to work well.
But you still have the first category, Notes and Documents, which is still an exceptionally large pile of paper. In this pile are notes and documents on everyone you have collected. You have your paternal side of the family as well as the maternal side of the family in there. This is the main cause of your piles of paper in the first place and will take some special treatment. But, before we take on this awesome task, let’s define the reasons that are causing this category to be so difficult to organize.
Two Problems
1. We have as our goal the job of identifying families. We are taught early that a family group sheet is our worksheet and everything we do should be based on the family group. The fact is, we do not start with a family group sheet — we start with genealogical events for individuals. The reason so many genealogist’s notes and documents need help is that they are trapped in a “family-oriented” way of thinking. A better way of thinking is to free yourself from families and develop a “surname-oriented” filing system. I will attempt to walk you through the process of changing from a “family system” to a “surname system” for the care and preservation of your notes and documents.
To explain, let’s forget about families for a moment. Let’s assume that the genealogical events for individuals – which are found in the notes and documents – precede the work of filling in a family group sheet. And, if that is true, then the first papers that need to be organized are not the family sheets, but the notes and documents that are used to compile the family group sheets.
Organizing family group sheets, as you already know, is not the problem. The problem is finding that marriage record you know you have . . . you know when and where you found it the first time . . . you even remember the color of the walls of the library, the microfilm reader you were using, the people who were in the room at the time, and what you had for lunch that day — you just can’t remember where you put that darned marriage record! I will propose a method that will allow you to find any marriage, birth, death, or residence event for any person. And you will be able to do it in seconds.
2. We gather genealogical information on more people than just our immediate ancestors. As a person born with the name Dollarhide, I was born curious about where that name came from. Today, I collect any person I can with the name, believing that we are related. Any genealogist with an unusual name in their background knows about this — we collect a lot of facts about a lot of unknown extra people simply because they have the right name. Virtually everything we collect as genealogists can be associated with three types of people in which we have an interest, known or unknown. Therefore, the notes and documents that you have collected will have sheets of paper for these three types of people:
A. Ancestors. Of course, we are interested in our ancestors, and any piece of paper that gives the names of an ancestor is something we want to save, however slight.
B. Collaterals. These are the brothers and sisters of our ancestors, plus their descendants. They are important to us because understanding their genealogy may lead to our own lineage. Therefore, we usually are interested in saving every instance where a known collateral’s name is written down somewhere.
C. Suspicious. This may be the largest group of people we collect. We are always finding some person with the right name who lived in the right place and in the right time period. This means the unknown person is highly suspicious of being an ancestor, or at least closely related.
Because of the nature of genealogical research, these three types of people cause us to collect much more paper than just our ancestors. We don’t want to lose contact with these people because they may turn out to be ancestors, so we save every sheet of paper, hence, our paper files grow and grow and grow.
Solving the Paper Collecting Problem
There is a solution to the paper-collecting problem. Since we collect notes and documents for ancestors and collaterals, and because we add extra people with the same surname because we think they might be related, then why not create a well-organized database of information just for the notes and documents? Instead of saving notes and documents by family, we could save notes and documents by surname. Hey! That means you could save notes and documents on anyone! It also means you might be able to find a record when you want it.
More importantly, if you start thinking about “surnames” instead of “families” as the way you control the paper in your notes and documents file, you have some new options. For example, what if you treated the ancestors, collaterals, and suspicious people as equals? What effect would that have on your notetaking? If you sort your notes and documents by surname instead of family, you could create a database of information that was not dependent on a family relationship at all. Remember, the notes and documents happen before a family group sheet happens. Therefore, a surname is a unifying factor that brings together people who are ancestors, collaterals, or suspicious. It also frees you from a family-oriented filing system.
There is one other important unifying factor in genealogy, and that is the place where someone lived. For example, by collecting and then sorting all Dollarhides who ever lived in North Carolina, regardless of their relationship to me, I would have a database of Dollarhide notes that would be easy to organize. And I would be able to create family group sheets from that database much easier. So how do we go about creating a surname-oriented database? We do it by following some simple rules.
In the next article, “Piles of Paper – Part 3,” I will present four rules for saving notes and documents.
For Further Reading:
- Piles of Paper, Part 1.
- Managing A Genealogical Project, a book by William Dollarhide.
- A Genealogist’s InstaGuide: Dollarhide’s Rules and Daffern’s Laws.