On organizing your genealogical materials by a professional librarian

 A couple of thoughts on organizing genealogical materials from a professional librarian, with an admission that I'm constantly organizing and changing my mind about how to organize.

1. Take a look at what you have and, in your head, and on paper, decide on general categories of what you have: photographs, notes, documents, charts, logs, correspondence, background and historic information of various kinds. I research ALL my families: maternal and paternal, so my first 2 categories are my maternal and my paternal sides. Each line has all those types of materials.

2. Decide which of those categories you need to access most often and start a more detailed organization of them: maybe photographs, maybe correspondence, maybe documents.

3. Decide how and where you're going to keep a category: in hanging files, in file pockets, in photographic storage boxes, in 3-ring binders.

4. How do you most often look for a particular type of material, like photographs? Everybody does this differently.

For example: I want to be able to find documents for a particular individual, then by type of document.

I keep documents in page protectors in 3-ring binders.

I label the 3-ring binders by whether they are for my maternal or my paternal side. Right now I have 2 binders for each line.

I made a list, by surname, given name and document, of what I have that is kept in the front of each binder.

If I began with 2 dozen documents, of various kinds, I first divided them into maternal and paternal lines, then by surname, then each individual's given name.

Each page protector can hold 2 pages, back to back. I filled my page protectors and put them in the binders they belonged in.

Almost immediately, you might see the dilemma, If I have one document for one person and 3 for another, do I leave page protectors empty waiting for additional documents which may or may not appear.  Soon you have a binder full of pages with and without documents, etc.  I found, over time, that it's simpler, when adding new documents, to add them to the back of the least full binder; adding them out of order. At the same time you have to number the page protectors, each side, forget saving spaces for possible future documents, and create an index, alphabetically by surname/given name, page no., binder no. so you can retrieve the document as needed. It looks something like this:

Name                    Page        Binder No.        Document

Brown, James,         131            M2                birth certificate    (M for maternal)

Brown, James            13            M1                death certificate

Jones, Carl                 23           M1                marriage certificate

Smith, Clara               23           M1                marriage certificate

I number the pages consecutively from binder to binder. This has been working for me for documents.

Each type of material is different. Each of us is different in how we do our research, in how we use these materials, so in how we organize them.