Is your workspace totally overwhelmed with piles of paper? Dining room table buried in “evidence” and “evidence” from your family history research? If so, you are not alone.
We all know that getting your foot in the door is the hardest part. So where do you start?
big to small.
Of course, it would be nice to know exactly where each piece of paper should go, right from the start, but that’s totally unrealistic. Sorting through each individual page at once will leave you in a worse mess than you started with, feeling stuck and totally overwhelmed. Instead, we’re going to start big and work our way down to smaller, more detailed organization. What the hell does that mean? In the same way that it can seem daunting to accomplish a big goal (for example, losing weight), it can be daunting to take on a big project as an organization. So we combat this by breaking it down into small chunks that we can do in our spare time, here or there. Think of a way to divide your investigation into about four groups. One method might be to use each grandparent’s last name (each of your grandparents’ last names and your grandmothers’ maiden names). There are other ways to split it, but generally speaking, this is a good split point.
get boxy with it
Get a box for each of the last names you’re using to divide things up, and an extra one for “other” papers. Label each one. Remember, however you decide to break it up, we’re starting with BIG general headings. We don’t want to do any detail-oriented work at this point.
If you used the example of grandparents’ names, you would put any documents belonging to any ancestor of that grandparent in that box. So, your grandfather’s father’s military records, put them in your grandfather’s box. Same with your grandfather’s mom’s baptismal records, even though she has a different last name than the one on the box. It doesn’t matter. Any record of his parents (and of his parents) will also go there.
I dont know? Don’t worry.
If you get confused or get stuck on a record, don’t worry, put it in the “other” box for now. We will come back to it later. The goal at this point is to place each document in one of those boxes in the shortest time possible. The sooner we complete this step, the sooner we can move on to the next. When we get to the next step, we’ll be one step closer to conquering our clutter and establishing an organizational system that will keep our paper in order from now on!
Hopefully, just by finishing this step, you’ll feel like getting organized will be a little easier and you’ll be able to see a noticeable difference in the state of your workspace.