Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Do you have any genealogy documents hiding in your home?

This article is a timely reminder of what can happen if you have unfiled genealogical documents lying around at home.

Do you have any genealogy documents hiding in your home? - Organize Your Family History:

In an extreme example of the perils of letting household filing pile up, I found my grandfather’s birth record over the weekend.

Over the last few years, I’d put some effort into figuring where he was born. It was mysterious to me because the census records said he was born in Oregon, yet his residence was always Washington. My father, his son, had no recollection of any family history in Oregon. Two years ago, I blogged about it when I discovered a birth announcement in a Portland paper. At that time I said I had written away to the state archives for a copy of the birth certificate. Alas, I received a letter from the Oregon Health Authority saying that no birth record was found.

The problem is, even when you have rediscovered such long-lost documents, how do you file them so you can find them again?

My solution, for the last 25 years, has been to use the Research Data Filer (RDF), but, since it is that old, it really needs an update, or at least another program that will perform the same function.

It's a question I've been asking for years, but I'm not sure we are any closer to the answer. At one point I wondered if Clooz might be the answer, but it seems so much more complex. One of the advantages of RDF was that it did one job, and it did it well and simply. Clooz seems much too complex.

Are there any programmers out there who would be willing to reverse engineer RDF, and produce something that would work as well, or better, and also import data from the old version?


 

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