[or-roots] filing system / sticky archives

[Leslie Chapman]

Okay, I was going to do this as one email, but the other one is way too
wordy to lose this message in;


First on sticky archive books, those are bad news in any form, as far as I
know none of them can be had in archival format, and they will eventually
get to be almost impossible to remove material from. I have been told that
gentle application of a hair dryer will soften the glue sometims and enable
you to remove photos with minimal damage, but have never tried it myself.


The next question that rears it's ugly head is how will Suz organize those
three ring binders. I know lots of genealogists that organize them by family
group; start with your point of entry; yourself, your children or whatever,
create a family page for that person, eg if I were to do it that way I would
do a family page for my wife, myself and my two children with the standard
family page format info for them, follow this with your collection of
documents; birth, marriage and death certs, photos, atta boys, certificates
of graduation, enlistment, immigration papers whatever;

Depending on how you want to do it; for example if you want every thing you
can find for that family group, you could put it in there, I mention in the
email to follow this one my family are pack rats, if I want to take this to
extreme, I could put pictures of myself, my wife and my son for nearly every
year we were in school, min and my wifes with all our class mates for most
of those years, I have old newspaper clippings dating back to my early
childhood from the Cottage grove Sentinel about who was visiting our ranch
or what my family was doing, I have high school essays I wrote, greeting
cards that were sent to me for significant birthdays ad infinitum, as you
can see you need to make a conscious decision up front what you want to
include in this format.

When you have finished the book for that family group, then you move to the
next layer; if you happen to be of an older generation and have married
grandchildren with great grands, you might be moving down, then you would
have the wedding pics etc for each happy couple and whatever stuff you have
accumulated on them put in the same format.

You can see the big advantage here of using protective sleeves; you can
shift things around. Now I did a dumb thing a while back and started gluing
my obits to a sheet of ordinary paper with rubber cement so I could put 3 to
5 inside each sheet protector. Unfortunately I figured out a while back that
I had jumped to confusion and put a couple of obits in for the in-laws of a
cousin that weren't in fact her in-laws, so had to chop up the page and
start over.

PLAN B; I have not organized my stuff as outlined above. I started out in a
small way and stuck the hardcopy documents in a three ring binder just
organized by event, and not even rationally at that. I call the first book
"Genealogy and Historical Records of Les Chapman" it originally contained
categories; death certs, marriage docs, obituaries, birth.  Then I added;
Census and History. the latter was just a catch all for family event fliers,
misc bits or relevance for example I have a newspaper clipping about Walden
Pond which on the face of it has nothing to do with my family, but has
significance to me for two reasons, one it mentions being down the road from
Minute Man Historical Monument, which somewhere along the way following the
path of the skirmishes between them and the redcoats you will pass in front
of the house once owned by one of my great uncles at the time, and two if
you read the right pages of Thoreu you will see some of my kin mentioned.

To get back to the point of this, I have taken this book and numbered the
pages, and created an index format LC doc # b/m/d/o/ which I then use as a
identifier in my sources in my FTM family file. It drives people I share the
file with nuts as the identifier means nothing to them, but I can go right
to any document by looking at the source which gives me the page number in
that section of my documents.

I hope this helps somebody.

Les C
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