Help, I Can’t Find My Family History/Genealogy Stuff!

Genealogy/Family History/Family Tree Organization

Help, I Can’t Find My Family History/Genealogy Stuff! 

Does this hit a chord? The past 2 weeks, I have spent my spare time renaming and organizing all my hard drive folders, including my business stuff and family history/genealogy stuff because I couldn’t find a thing when I needed it! Sound familiar? 😉

I am now in the process of backing everything up to new SSD drives, as my old portable HDD drives are too slow when it comes to backing up a whole hard drive and/or cloud backup, even the one I just bought last year. My HDD drives could take hours to even a whole day! So far, I have backed up just my business folder and family history folder, with the former taking about 15 minutes to back up, and the latter taking about 20.

I’m not one for reading up on genealogy/family history/family tree digital organization, as I believe everyone needs to organize things the way that feels right for them, and everyone has their own method for doing things. I pretty much have this belief system for anything and everything, but I do like to learn new tips, just not follow someone else’s method for doing something.

What I Did To Organize:

• Renamed the majority of my folders to make it simple
• Cleaned up the amount of my folders, as it was an eyesore
• Nested folders, in a way that works for me
• Numbered my direct lines by their generation, which keeps them at the top and in order for me and hopefully will help family out one day when I pass
• Labeled my direct lines by their relationship to help family out one day when I pass​

​
I am still not 100% happy with the way I organized everything, but it is WAY better than the mess it was!  😉 I must have renamed and reorganized folders over 10 times, each, before I was somewhat happy with them, especially my family history!

Why did I feel the need to have to spend the last 2 weeks doing it all at once? It was time to back it up again! I’ve learned my lesson about renaming and moving folders, and then trying to back them up on the same portable hard drive! It takes LONGER, much longer, and it will stop repeatedly, asking you to confirm almost each and every thing, so you can’t just walk away, come back, and expect it to be done! Not only that, but it will miss copying many items. Like I said, lesson learned.  

Examples:

Overall Documents Folder

My Documents Folder Organization Example

A Documents Subfolder Organization Example: Lifestyle

Business Folder

My Business Subfolder Organization Example

My Business Subfolder Organization Example, Continued

Family History/Genealogy Folder

My Family History/Genealogy Subfolder Organization Example

A Family History/Genealogy Subfolder Organization, Level 2 Example

A Family History/Genealogy Subfolder Organization, Level 3 Example

A Family History/Genealogy Subfolder Organization, Level 4 Example

Things to keep in mind:

No matter how messy or hard it is to find something, you can always search for something in the search bar, but keep in mind that you would have to remember what you named something, at least ballpark, to find it. 😉 

Back in the day, well over a decade ago, I had just saved my downloaded, scanned, etc. family tree stuff as named into just my general family tree folder, and sometimes to a surname folder, so searching for things is extremely difficult, for the old stuff that is. I do not want, nor do I have the time, to go back and rename ALL the thousands of old family tree files, so renaming and reorganizing the folders was the best I could do, for now.