Genealogy in TV
 

My 90 year old mother and I own a home in TV but we haven't moved there yet! We both are into genealogy.

When I was at the FGS Conference in Fort Wayne last year I met the president of the Villages Genealogy Society and she told me about their society. I was able to join because we own a home in TV and I love their monthly newsletter.

I'm really curious what everyone does with all the books and paperwork you have accumulated doing genealogy. We built an Iris (in 2012) when it still had that little niche off the garage that I hope to make into a small office.

I heard Dick Eastman a couple of months ago. He now lives in a small trailer and stores everything in the Cloud. He said he only kept a Family Bible and an antique book. Everything else was scanned and thrown away! That idea scares me to death!!

If your into genealogy, what do you do with all of your materials??

I haven't really accumulated much yet as I'm just getting started tracing my family. Most pictures are held by family but I have a few.

I am overly cautious and I keep all my hard copies in the closet. However, I keep the info on two different PCs in the house, one external hard drive, one copy on Dropbox and one on Box...both cloud storages. I also have the trees on Ancestry. About once a year, I email the trees to myself as an extra back up. I transcribe old letters and newspaper articles, etc and keep them and the scanned copies also on the cloud as well as scanned pics.
Some people use a cloud service such as Carbonite that backs up their computer. I think that runs about $60 a year.

I am currently going through all my genealogy family and research hanging files and folders. I have been scanning anything that I have collected during personal trips and personal letters into my computer. The original letters I am keeping if they pertain to my family.

I have many family trees sent to me and pages and pages of census records that I copied from microfiche and US census rolls. Since those are available online now, I have been able to shred those after getting the information I need from them.

I have hundreds of old photographs. I am scanning them into my computer, and making sure they have captions. I am keeping the photos.

I have been doing a pretty good job of thinning the excess. I know I will still have a bookshelf full of historical and county books an a couple of file drawers with information that cannot be replaced.

I DO have Carbonite, and it has saved me several times. I have recently bought an external drive. I haven't uploaded my tree to Ancestry yet, but I will. I need to add sources and citations to my tree first.

I have downloaded Dropbox, but I am not really sure what to do with it!

I've been doing family history since I was 12 years old when I started going to my great grandmother's house for lunch when I was in junior high school. :thumbup:

Don, ask your family to scan those photos at Walgreen's or Walmart, then you can download them. In the olden days (before all the technology) I had to go to Walgreens and make actual negatives of the photographs, then it was a little more difficult.