Organizing your family history research with Zotero - Organize Your Family History

Organizing your family history research with Zotero - Organize Your Family History:

Zotero is great for genealogy for all of these reasons and more:

• It is free, with the stability and support of a university backing it up.
• Even if you are syncing to the Zotero cloud, you can do that for years on free storage, before you have to buy some. And when you do buy storage, it’s inexpensive and unlimited.
  
• It provides the structure missing from tools like OneNote and EverNote, but brings substantial flexibility, along with the structure.
  
• It can add most catalogued online source citations to your Zotero library with one click.
  It can organize and provide one-click access to the thousands of documents, spreadsheets, photographs, and other files you have saved to your hard drive. In essence, it can draw all those files together into a uniform, organized system.
• Zotero becomes your door to all you have collected.
  It allows you to create a record once but to file it in as many folders as you want without taking up significant extra space. You make a change once, and it changes in every folder.
  
• You can find things rapidly, even if you only have vague memories of having long ago found a document that might be of use in solving a new genealogical problem.
  It will sync to the cloud, allowing you to access your work at Zotero.org, wherever you have Wifi access.

Why I am still using a 22-year-old genealogy program

People are sometimes surprised when I tell them I am still using a genealogy program that is more than 20 years old. It is the 1993 version of the Family History System (FHS) by Philip Brown.

I started using it in 1987, when I got an MS-DOS computer for the first time, and tried out a whole bunch of shareware genealogy programs. FHS seemed to be the best of the bunch, and it was so good that I'm still using it today.

It came as a free version, with optional extensions that one could buy, and I soon bought them. And the author was open to suggestions for improvements. One that I suggested, and he adopted, was an option using the yyyy-mm-dd format for  data entry, which is standard in South Africa, and is the only unambiguous system for entering all-numeric dates.

But why do I still use it today?

I don't use it alone. I use it in conjunction with other programs. I use Legacy for its fancy printed reports and fields for extra information. I use RootsMagic for quick 'n dirty research, adding stuff from all over, and sorting it out later (it has a note field for every event, which is good for that).

But FHS still has several capabilities that none of the others have.

First among them, and which is the key to using it in conjunction with the other programs, is that it has the capability of exporting a GEDCOM file with a defined range of RINs. That means I can export records 19257-19643, and when I import them into another program those records will still have RINs 19257-19263, and person 19439 in FHS will be the same person as 19439 in Legacy, PAF, and any other program I import the file to.

That alone is sufficient reason for me to continue using FHS, and using it as my program of first data entry. No other genealogy program that I know of has that capability, or if it has, it is so well-hidden and difficult to access that I have never been able to discover it.

A second reason I continue to use FHS is that it can spit out free-form reports that can be incorporated into e-mail messages, newsgroup posts and other places where ASCII text is useful. Here's one that I used recently:

Family Group Report
For: John Stringer Worrall  (ID=12780)                           
Date Prepared: 30 Jun 2015 

NAME: WORRALL, John Stringer, Born ??? 1823 in Manchester, LAN,  
  ENG, Died May 1879? in Islington, London at age 56; FATHER:  
  WORRALL, Elisha; MOTHER: STRINGER, Sarah; Bookbinder and  
  illustrator 
   
MARRIED 27 Jan 1859 in Manchester, LAN, ENG, to COTTAM, Mary,  
  Born Oct 1838 in Manchester, Died ???; FATHER: COTTAM, Richard,
  Born ??? 1812, Died Feb 1877 at age 65; MOTHER: BAGOT,  
  Margaret, Born 22 Jan 1811, Died Feb 1882 at age 71 
   
CHILDREN:
 1. F  WORRALL, Maggie, born 1 Jun 1861 in Manchester, LAN, ENG, 
       died ???; Married 23 Jul 1892 to EDGE, William Edward; 4  
       children 
 2. M  WORRALL, John James, born ??? 1864 in Manchester, LAN,  
       ENG, died ???; Married Feb 1910 to GROVER, Harriet  
       Elizabeth; 3 children 
 3. F  WORRALL, Bessie Bagot, born 5 Feb 1866 in Islington,  
       London, died Nov 1867 in Islington, London 
 4. F  WORRALL, Bessie Bagot, born Aug 1868 in London, MDX, ENG, 
       died ???; Married to BUSH, Harry; 4 children 
 5. F  WORRALL, Lucy Naomi, born Aug 1871 in London, MDX, ENG,  
       died Aug 1900 
 6. M  WORRALL, William Harry, born ??? 1874 in London, MDX, ENG,
       died ???; Married ??? 1905 to KNIGHT, Louise; 1 child 
 7. M  WORRALL, George Frederick, born ??? 1877 in London, MDX,  
       ENG, died ???; Married to Lizzie 

I don't know of any other genealogy program that can do that.

A third reason that I still use it is that it can produce relative reports like no other genealogy program, and it can select all the relatives of any person in the database and export those relatioves, and those relatives only, to a GEDCOM file.

So if my third cousin once removed on my mother's side wants a GEDCOM file of his relatives, he is not interested in my father's side of the family, or my wife's side of the family. I can give him a GEDCOM containing just his relatives. It offers a choice of whether to include spouses, and also children of spouses and spoouses of children, who would be related not by blood but by marriage.

As far as I am aware those three features are not available in any other genealogy program, and that is why I continue to use FHS, even though it is over 20 years old.

So I use Legacy for its fancy reports and extra details, but I still enter my data in FHS and export it by Gedcom, first to PAF 4.0, and import from there to Legacy. Thus each person in the Legacy file has the same RIN as in FHS.

If I import the Gedcom direct to Legacy instead of first to PAF, it scrambles the RINs -- something that the people at Millennia have sometimes promised to fix, but never have.

I keep my FHS database on both my desktop computer (running Windows XP) and my laptop (running Windows 7)., so that if I take my laptop to the archives or a library, I can add people there, and transfer to my desktop computer when
I get home. I transfer using a USB flash drive, which therefore serves as an additional backup for both computers. Actually I have two USB flash drives for that purpose, and alternate them weekly, which provides even more backup.

I do the transfers of FHS and other data using four batch files: dsk2flsh.bat, flsh2lap, lap2flsh, flsh2dsk, so all that is requred is typing a single command for all the files to be transferred. That doesn't only concern FHS, of course, so I just mention that in passing.

There may be other FHS users out there, and if you can think of any of the capabilities of FHS that I've left out, particularly those not found in other genealogy programs, please add them in comments.

And many thanks to Philip Brown, one of the pioneers of genealogical computing, whose work remains unsurpassed in some respects to this day.

Using Evernote, OneNote and askSam for genealogy

Evernote, askSam and OneNote are notetaking programs that allow you to organise the kind of miscellaneous information that one collects in genealogical research -- the kind of information that makes you say to yourself, "I don't know where this fits in, but I'll make a note of it in case I need it later. The trouble is that when you need it later, you can't remember where you put it.

These notetaking programs help you to store such information, and to find it again.

Since I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago, I've noticed that a lot of other people also seemed to be blogging about it, and so I thought I would list some of the useful blog posts I've found, thus reverting to the original purpose and meaning of a blog, a weB log of web sites one has visited and found useful.

I've been using askSam for more than 20 years, beginning with the DOS version, and I still use the DOS version (though I have the Windows version as well). It is powerful and has the advantage of being both a structured and an unstructured database at the same time. But you have to buy it. If yoi want to know more, see the askSam website here.

If you have Microsoft Office, however, you probably have OneNote as part of the bundle, so then you don't have to go out and buy it.

And Evernote is free, unless you become really addicted and start adding more than 60 Mb of data a month. Then you can get a paid version that does more.If you would like to try it, see the Evernote web site here.

So how do you use these programs for genealogy? Here are some links with useful tips:

Evernote

• Genealogy Insider - Using Evernote to Organize My Genealogy Research: My former method of genealogy research organization was to email myself notes and records, or use notekeeping gadgets on my iGoogle page. But with the emails getting buried in my in-box and the impending retirement of iGoogle, I wasn't very organized. Then I started hearing more about the Evernote web clipper and note-taker, and we began planning an Evernote for genealogists webinar with Lisa Louise Cooke (it's July 25—more details below).
• How to Use Evernote for Genealogical Research | Evernote Blog Evernote Blog: I use Evernote to capture documents, images, and PDFs I find online, and later add descriptive notes to these pieces of information. Serious genealogists try to keep a record of everything they find, even if it’s full of lies and conjecture. (For example, if you suspect that a document might be fraudulent or inaccurate, you can make a note of it. If you come across it again, you will know that you already saw and evaluated it.) Using Evernote, you can add your own notes, questions, and task boxes to the images of records you find in your research.
• Evernote: Your Virtual Genealogy Assistant | Thomas MacEntee: Evernote is a genealogy researcher's best friend and one of the best tools you can use to capture almost anything. This means not just items found online, but also images, documents and more! The best way to understand Evernote features is to imagine having your own personal assistant, but one that is virtual (meaning they cost practically nothing and never call in sick or complain about the workload!).
• Genealogy Class - Evernote for Genealogists: clip sources anywhere & organize in the cloud - Rootfinders Genealogy Research: “Evernote” is a program or app that synchs notes, pictures, audio, and pdfs from many devices including PCs Macs, iPhones, iPads, Android Phones, tablets and Kindle Fire. How can we use it for genealogy? Snap a photo of Uncle Pete’s headstone with your phone at the cemetery. Scan a document to the laptop at the library. Record the story Great Aunt Martha told in the car. Clip an article from the web. Then tag and store them all in Evernote. When you get home, they’ll all be synched to all your devices and computers. You can share notebooks with others. And if any of your devices crash or get lost, your notes are still safe in the cloud with Evernote.
• UpFront with NGS: Evernote -- is it part of your genealogical arsenal? Should it be?: Thomas MacEntee (High-Definition Genealogy) recently posted on Facebook a link to the Beginner’s Guide to Evernote and he has an article at Archives.com, Evernote: Your Virtual Genealogy Assistant. So, if you’ve been dilly-dallying about trying Evernote (cough – this author falls into that category), you may have run out of excuses ... 
• Anglo-Boer War photos | Hayes & Greene family history: I’m quite chuffed with Evernote. It can do lots of different things, but one of the things it excels at is compiling a digital photo album.

Or just Google for "Evernote genealogy"

OneNote

• Research Planning Using OneNote & Evernote - Try It! | The In-Depth Genealogist: Family history researchers are constantly planning their next research move. Whether you realize it or not, you probably are using some form of a research plan in your genealogical endeavors. Perhaps you do it the old fashioned way using pencil and paper to compile a “to do list.” Maybe you use a word processor to write a formal research plan or an electronic spreadsheet to organize your look-ups for your next trip to the Family History Library. The options for which tool you use to prepare a research plan are numerous. Lately, I’ve become fond of two relatively new tools: Microsoft’s OneNote and Evernote.
• The Paperless Genealogist: Introduction To OneNote For Genealogists: Well, I've started using Microsoft's OneNote to organize my digital files, and I realized as I started that there a lot of videos and "How To" articles on the internet about organizing your genealogy, but most of them assume you are dealing with stacks of paper, which of course, I am trying to avoid. So, after a little bit of use, I put together this "Introduction To OneNote For Genealogists" video.

As I noted in an earlier blog post, I tend to prefer Evernote to OneNote because there's more documentation available and it's more explicit. Most of the stuff on OneNote seems to be in the form of videos, and when it comes to learning to use software, I'm a verbal type -- I like the instructions to be in words I can read and refer to while I'm using the software. 

askSam

Unfortunately nobody seems to have written much about how they use askSam for genealogy, other than me, that is.

So if you, or someone you know, is using askSam for genealogy, I'd love to hear from them.

At last I'm getting the hang of Evernote

I've had Evernote on my computer for several years, but haven't used it much until now.

It came on one of those discs that come stuck to the front of computer magazines, and I installed it, and when I read the description of how it worked I thought it must be useful, but I somehow never managed to do much more than write a few test notes. The description made it sound as though it must be useful, but I could never get the hang of using it.

But when, on genealogy forums, people asked, as they do surprisingly often, what you do with all the notes scribbled on bits of paper, I would sometimes suggest that they have a look at Evernote. Though I didn't use it much myself, it sounded as though it could be useful.

As recently a couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article on that topic, Genealogy notes and news: Managing research data: hastily scribbled ideas, scraps of paper and sticky notes, and I forgot to mention Evernote.

But after writing the article, I thought I must really make an effort to get to grips with Evernote, and so I sar down with the book, and re-read it. And then sat down in front of the computer with it, and tried out everything. It worked.

So what is Evernote?

Do you know Microsoft OneNote?

It's a program that comes with Microsoft Office, but none of the books you can buy about using MS Office tell you how to use it (sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when softwere came with actual documentation). I couldn't even get a third-party book for using OneNote. But my daughter who is studying for a doctorate in Greece discovered it, and said it was very useful for taking notes.

Well Evernote is something like that, but it's free. And I found a book about it.

My Evernote by Katherine Murray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've read the book a couple of times, and some parts several times, and I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it now.

One of the useful things about Evernote is that it synchronises across all devices. That means that I can have a copy on my desktop computer, my cell phone and my laptop computer, and I can enter and access data in all three places. And you can also access it on the Web, as the Evernote server is where all the synchronisation takes place. And if that isn't enough, you can send entries to it by e-mail, or even by tweeting from Twitter.

So what does it do for genealogists who want to know what to do with all those notes scribbled on scraps of paper, and on paper napkins and the like?

My method, described in my other post, is to make notes in a text database program, which means that even if I lose the original scrap of paper, I can find the information again, which makes it much more useful. But some people, like this blogger, don't like retyping, Marian's Roots and Rambles: Taming all that Information! - Part 1:

Ok, I know some of you are thinking, how does she get those handwritten transcriptions into the computer?!! Most of the time, unless there is a very good reason, I will scan my original notes and capture them as a pdf or jpg. That way I can save time by not retyping them and I don't have to worry about introducing further errors.

But if you have a zillion pdf and jpeg files, how do you find them again? She does it by typing long descriptive file names. But how much easier to scan them directly into Evernote (Yes We Scan!) And Evernote claims to be able to read and search for text in graphic files (I haven't tried that yet).

Evernote lets you have up to 250 different notebooks (one for genealogy, one for recipes, one for gardening, one for your PhD notes etc.) And its free. If you really need more, there's a premium version you can pay for.

Evernote also lets you clip web pages -- either the whole page, or a particular article, or selected text. It even advises you on which way to do it, but you don't have to take the advice if you don't want to.

And what if you really like working with pieces of paper? I know some researchers do like that. Well Evernote can print out your notes for you, on 3x5" cards, if that's what you want, so that you can shuffle them and spread them out on the dining-room table.

So why not go to www.evernote.com and give it a try? There's nothing to lose, and it could solve your filing problem.

What about Microsoft OneNote?

Well Evernote can import that too.


View all my reviews

Update

I've just discovered that some other bloggers are also discussing the genealogical uses of Evernote, so check for more tims and resources here UpFront with NGS: Evernote -- is it part of your genealogical arsenal? Should it be?

Event-based history and genealogy software for family historians, biographers and others

If you are looking for a lineage-linked genealogy program to keep your family tree and show all your relations, there is a wide choice available. Some, like Legacy and Personal Ancestal File (PAF) are free, others are shareware, and others you have to pay for up front. They all do much the same thing -- they allow you to enter people who are related to one another and show the relationships between them.

What they are not so good for, however, are collecting information about people who you think might be related, but aren't sure of. Lineage linked programs are fairly narrowly genealogical. Family historians often have wider interests, however, and sometimes it is important to show other people who influenced a family -- people like business partners, close friends, bosses and so on. These people are related, though the relationship is not genealogical.

So I think there is a real need for an event-based program to be used as a research tool, not only for genealogists and family historians, but also for general historians, biographers and others. It would differ from lineage-linked genealogy programs in that it would not only include people that were relatives, but friends and acquaintaces, work colleagues, and even enemies. It would be a useful tool for a biographer trying to keep track of the events in the life of their subject, or for someone writing general history as well. It could even be used by detectives tracing the activities of a suspect, or the sequence of events relating to a particular crime or series of crimes.

The main part of the database would be a chronological list of events, with links to people and organisations assocated with these events. The organisations could be both formal and informal groups — a political party, church, club, school, hospital, business firm, trade union, family or any other human group.

The basic outline of the program would look something like this:

The “people” part would not only be for family members, as one finds in lineage-linked genealogy programs, but for non-related people, like friends, work colleagues, teachers, pupils, godparents, acquaintances and so on. Perhaps it could also be useful in testing theories of six degrees of relationship — that we are only six degrees of relationship away from knowing everyone else on earth, and that my wife’s boss’s godmother’s cousin’s penfriend’s vet knows me.

A biographer could use it as a research tool for keeping track of the events in the life of the subject. One kind of early record might be a baptism record, for example. The baptism would be the event, and would link to people who were known to be present -- parents, godparents, and the church minister performing the ceremony, but others who were present as well. The godparents might or might not be genealogically related to the person being baptised, but would be recorded anyway. As information is added to the database, the relationship and influence of that person on the subject can be followed.

It could also be used by fiction writers for keeping track of events and characters in a novel.

A historian using such a program could use it for tracing the history of an organisation and its leaders, and chronologically arranging events in the life of the organisation, with information about the people involved in each event. A literary historian could use it to trace the interrelationships of a school of writers.

I've discussed this with various people, including Dennis Allsopp, the author of two genealogical note-taking and source-recording programs, Genota and Genforms. But this is not quite the same thing as a note-taking program. A note-taking program is for recording evidence rather than conclusions. A lineage-linked program is for recording conclusions (you have concluded that the people you have linked are related) and the evidence that supports those conclusions.

This program would be a research tool for recording both evidence and conclusions. It could be used by genealogist in conjunction with a lineage-linked genealogy program and a note-taking program. It could be used by biographers and historians on its own, or with a note-taking program. It would enable the user to link various pieces of evidence to show relationships between them and suggest conclusions.

My problem is that though I have a fairly good idea of what I want, I'm not a programming fundi, and can't write such a program myself. What it really needs is a group of programmers and researchers who could discuss their research needs, and produce a program that meets those needs.

If you are reading this and feel the need for such a program, there is a forum for discussing it, which you are welcome to join. I've also posted a skeleton of tables in MS Access based on the model above, which you can download to experiment with and comment on.

Recording sources and documents

A few weeks ago I met Dennis Allsopp for lunch. Dennis lives in Australia, but visits South Africa occasionally on business, and one of his interests is developing the Genota family of genealogical note-taking software.

He had read my blog post on Keeping track of paper files | Hayes & Greene family history and decided to take up the challenge of developing a replacement for the Research Data Filer (RDF) program that used to be bundled with earlier versions of the Personal Ancestral File (PAF) lineage-linked program.

One of the problems with RDF is that it's a DOS program and it's a schlepp printing reports from DOS programs with Windows printers. But, as I noted in my earlier post, I've still found no better way of keeping track of paper files.

So if Dennis manages to develop a newer program that will do what RDF does, I'll be interested. I suppose the biggest challenge will be to get it to import the old RDF data.

Developing that might take quite a while, but in the mean time I played with Dennis's Genota Forms program and gave him a sample form template for entering information from South African deceased estate records. That could make it a hit with Southern African genealogists, as South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe use similar methods of handling deceased estates (called probate in other places).

A fresh start for this blog

I'm revamping this old family history blog, which has been dormant for a couple of years, and turning it into a general family history and genealogy blog. Our personal family history research will still mostly be on our other blog, which is on WordPress, which is better for things like posting family photos.

This blog will be for more general posts on family and local history and genealogy. News, information about resources, family history software, or background interest about places of interest, and especially the areas we are interested in -- southern Africa, the UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The blogroll will reflect this, though I'll also be happy to link to any halfway decent genealogy blog that displays the "Recent Viewers" widget from MyBlogLog and/or BlogCatalog.