So far so good on our new year’s resolutions. Amy is weeding through her piles of documents in her home office, watching webinars but not ones that count, and she submitted her DAR supplement application. Penny has been working on her French genealogy of her maternal grandmother which is taking up quite a bit of time.
In episode #50 of our podcast, we discuss our research and some plans and strategies we employ to make it easier and more complete. So let’s start with Trello. Penny discovered it while listening to a webinar hosted by D. Joshua Taylor where he mentioned using it for genealogy research and was intrigued. After watching a few youtube videos (putting Trello genealogy in the search bar) to see how other genealogists use Trello she tried it out. Amy has used it at work working with colleagues on genealogical document searches as well.
Trello consists of Boards – Lists – Cards. Penny likes to think of it as the card catalog, the drawer, and the cards, just a visual in case you are a visual learner. She created a board with a genealogical question “Who were Catherine Bernert’s parents?” The lists created were:
Catherine – information about the person if there is any
Family – listing her spouse and children with any documentation that could be helpful
Things to Check – places where she could look for documents
Documents Found – Listing all the documents already found including a photo of the document and web address or source information
Documents Needed – List anything might be needed to answer the question
Answer to the question – if answered put it here.
You can choose your background and Penny plugged in “castle” in the search box and chose this one. Love it! Also, this photo is resized to fit here but it gives you a good idea of what the page looks like.
Each list then holds cards pertaining to the list as you can see here. You can have as many cards as you need in each list.
There are many different ways to use Trello for your research and help you see exactly what you have and what you need for your research. You can also share your boards with others and work collaboratively. Give it a try.
While working on her French genealogy, Penny utilized two different websites for trees and another for documents. The sites used for trees were Geneanet and Heredis. You can add your tree to both sites or just use them for ancestor research. Using these trees to check for ancestors and getting dates gives a clue on where and when to look for documents. After getting dates for some of her ancestors Penny utilized the Archives of the Haute Rhin which has digitized everything from 1793-1892. Her process from there goes as follows:
- find the documents needed in the Archives
- use a snipping tool to copy the document and save (if you can download a document then you don’t have to use a snipping tool)
- copy the URL
- make a new copy of the document and include the URL and citation on the document by adding a text box (Penny used Paint to add the text box) then save this new document
- print the second document and file in binder alphabetically with a label including name, date, type of document, and where found so you have a paper file
- file the digital document in the appropriate digital file in the computer so you have a digital file as well
- attach the digital file to the ancestor in your personal computer-based program
Did this take some time? Heck yes! But well worth it. Those documents are backed up and are now easy to find. And truly, the most time-consuming part was finding the documents as we all know. Cheers!
