Well... here's the thing... I, like my mother (*cough*) tend to collect things and one of my favorite things to do as a researcher is to collect maps, records-birth, marriage, etc.. I have been on a reading blogs kick these last few months and thought to myself... hmm do I have my records in my genealogy files organize? how many of the same records have I downloaded do I have? how many files have I started for the same ancestors? If I can honestly answer these questions I am good to go because I know where all my records are. Well I miserably failed to answer any of the questions... So on June 6, 2015, I decided it was time to sit down on my genealogy hands and get to work organizing instead!
The task of gathering all my genealogy files on my laptop and backup drive and putting them all in ONE folder on the desktop. I then created a new folder labeled Genealogy- with sub-folders labeled Mothers Family Line and Fathers Family line.
I begin to comb through the mountainous pile on my desktop and sort through one folder at a time. There were NUMEROUS duplicate files <smh> at the end of the day.. I kept telling myself that Rome wasn't built in a day.. It took nearly 3 days to do this and 2,494 deleted files later... I now have a newly Genealogy folder that only contains one birth record for the particular ancestor and not 3.
Am I off the hook now? Can I go back to researching? My little fingers are itching to look up more ancestors... BUT I am on a mission now... I need to back up my newly filing system and create a database to prevent any more duplicates in the future. This will probably take the rest of June because I also want to go digital on my paper file... oh geez don't even get my started on this one! I am one of those people who rather gather information and not store them in an organize fashion..
However, I am slowly retraining myself to think smarter not work harder =)
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