Sorting Saturday ~ Hard Drive Organization

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When I started working on my family tree again this fall I started gathering a large number of images and data.  I started with a 2 week trial membership on Ancestry and downloaded all the BMD records and census images that I needed.  As long as things were attached to my Ancestry tree this was easy to keep track of.  But when I switched to using a offline family tree program, I now had a huge amount of data and needed to find a way to organize it.
Then I stumbled onto a podcast called Hard Drive Organization.  This lined up with what I was thinking and gave me some good tips to get started.

What I have done is create a genealogy folder inside my Dropbox folder.  Then I have a surnames folder inside that.  Now were I changed things from the suggestions in the podcast, I don’t group all the family’s with the same surname under one folder.  Instead I group by they husbands last name.  I find this is easier for me to find a record quickly rather then searching though all the items for one family branch.

Inside each family folder I make sub folders for birth, marriage, census and any other unique data needed.  I’m still working my way through a mountain of images, getting them organized and linked into my RootsMagic program.  I will be glad when it’s all done!  But one good thing about redoing all of this is I’m going over each record and finding new information I missed the first time I read them.