Michael John Neill's Genealogy Tip of the Day reminded us to take the information we have scribbled on scraps of paper and put it in a format so that we can locate it and use it. Keeping information recorded in documents on Google Drive lets me do just that.
In her later years my mother would jot down bits of family information as she thought of them - names, dates, lineage, etc. She kept all those scraps of paper together and gave them to me some years ago. Now I have transcribed all those notes and saved it as a document on Google Drive, easy for me to locate when I'm trying to search for or verify information. Maybe someday I will finally learn the name of that aunt with whom my Grandmother Myren lived in Minnesota when she met my Grandfather around 1908. Mother's notes are there to guide me in that quest.
Dear Myrtle, in a recent post, remarked that "spreadsheets aren't just for research logs anymore". How true. Recently I posted about my experiences going through my uncle's military records. Making a spreadsheet (sampled below) and saving it on Google Drive helped me make sense of all the material there.
As I found new information, I added it to the database, sorted, and ended up with an index to all of those papers, much easier that the "dining room table method" Myrtle and many of us have used in the past.
My documents and spreadsheets stored on Google Drive still include research logs. In addition to these two documents, I also have Geographical To-Do-Lists, Surname To-Do-Lists, Daily and Topic Blogging Prompts, and Ideas for Future Blogs, all easy to access wherever I am, whenever I need them. All just one more way to organize my family research.
I have just started a blog and I have been looking at other blogs to see how people set there blogs up. I noticed that you are pretty new at this too and I justed wanted to say Hi.
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http://hooverhistory.blogspot.com/
Thanks for stopping by.
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