Category: Organization

First and foremost, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season! No matter what you celebrate I hope you’re able to spend lots of quality time with your families and friends.

I certainly never expected to be absent this long from my blog. However, looking back I usually am during this time of year. My new computer is running just fine, only a few hiccups related to my old hard drives.

Here are the things I’ll be working on as a priority:

1. Cleaning out all my hard drives and condensing them down. Partially due to the issues I’m experiencing with one of my extra drives.  I’ll be backuping them up to CD, flash drive and Dropbox. Lots of work, but it’s long overdue!
2. Re-syncing my Ancestry Member Tree and my FTM 2014 trees. I’ll be honest, I haven’t touched my family tree since getting the new computer. I even let my memberships lapse again, but this time I’m going to experiment with other methods of getting my data since I used my extra money to purchase a new computer. There are plenty of options out there and I need to focus on what information I already have anyway!
3. The website. There’s been a lot going on with my website for a few years that I’ve been ignoring. Including an over abundance of domain names and duplicate TNG installations. So I’ve got to do a clean out of not only my personal computer but my internet files also.

I think that’s enough for now! I’m hoping that cleaning out the mess from before and after the computer switch will get my head back in the game. Right now I’m having a hard time making any sense of my files, so anything I can do has to be progress.

Do you have troubles getting back into the swing of things after a break? Any big plans for the holiday? My house is finally decorated so it’s time to relax for us!

Wow guys! I sure didn’t expect to be down a whole month from the blog. I had told you about my ordering my new computer, and I was happily still working on my cleaned up files until about 2 weeks before the computer came. Then my old computer committed an unforgivable act. It corrupted my working file. Fortunately for me that was the day my computer was originally scheduled to be delivered. Unfortunately, the computer was delayed twice due to parts being out of stock. I was scared to use my old computer so I just put up my genealogy and worked on quilts. I was very lucky that I had just backed up, so I lost almost no progress. Phew!

Now I have the new computer and it’s wonderful! I didn’t realize how much my computer had slowed down and didn’t work until I had a working one again. The only problem is now I’m faced with the mess I left behind with the old computer. Good news being that I lost zero files.

Being honest with myself tells me that no matter what happened, the second I bought my computer I was going to have to face this issue. No getting around it. After reading the FAQ on Ancestry and thinking out the situation I think I know how I’m going to proceed.

Bottom Line = New Computer means that my Online Tree and FTM file are no longer synced. There isn’t a way to connect the two again except for the options I’m about to outline.

Continue reading “Happy Almost November!” →

Or at least, what I’m calling a glitch. I have no idea if this is something I’ve done or if it’s a bonafide glitch. I just know I add my stuff the same way every time and I don’t have 8,345 instances of Johnsville, Bracken County, Kentucky in my file.

Continue reading “Family Tree Maker 2012 Places Glitch” →

While taking a brief break from my new goal, I was organizing some of my Love family. I was also trying to get some of the database section updated. Unfortunately there were two problems with that.

Continue reading “I Guess I Still Have a Numbering Problem” →

I’m pretty sure back on October 31st, I didn’t realize that I’d be taken an almost three month genealogy hiatus. I have no idea what made that happen, it just did. So I apologize for only posting diary entries for the last three months and hopefully, I’ll be getting back in the swing of genealogy here soon. Some of my plans include, updating you on the never-ending site re-design, the tragedy the befell my organization system, and get some thoughts out about finally getting around to communicating with my DNA matches on Ancestry.com. I may have only glanced at things in the last few months, but I still have a ton of thoughts running through my head!

Continue reading “An Apology and an Answer” →

I’ve been trying to get back into some kind of routine for months now. What I didn’t realize was that I might not be able to have a set routine anymore. While I was walking through Target the other day, I saw this monthly planner on a clearance rack. What I liked about it was that it has the month in a nice, big format. So I’m able to fit numerous things per box. I had made a calendar for use in my Genealogy Binder, but I didn’t like having to lug that binder out everyday. Since that binder also held my blog ideas list, I also had to get the binder out every time I wanted to write a blog entry. As you can tell from my sporadic updates, it hasn’t been working well for me.

Continue reading “I have a new planner and I’m going on a trip!” →

On July 2nd, I posted an entry titled, What I’ve Been Working On. In the entry I wrote:

 If I had synced my FTM file with Ancestry.com, then my source citations would have been a little weird. For example, it would have shown everything on the Ancestry tree, however, the census images and death records wouldn’t be linkable to the databases on Ancestry.

After posting this entry, Russ Worthington, who writes the ever helpful Family Tree Maker User blog, posted a comment wondering if what I was saying was true. It’s tough to get points across through blog comments, so I’m going to show an example of what I actually meant. However, Russ is technically right, there are ways to sync the files so that the citations are linked and how I want, it just takes a little work.

Continue reading “What I meant about syncing my FTM file” →

I’ve been a little silent on the blog writing and reading front. Summer is in full swing so I bet everyone knows what that means! Yard work! Fun stuff there. I haven’t been doing as much as the rest of my family, but we’re working on our yard and I’ve spent a week dogsitting. Not to mention this heatwave! So one of the things I’ve been doing in the evenings is adding things to a private family tree on Ancestry.com. I’ve gone back and forth for ages on this subject, and I finally decided to have a private family tree there.

The advantages are that I will have a sharable tree to invite new connections to. I will also be able to show my source photos. A lot of my pictures are already on Ancestry from people who have visited the website in the past and saved the images. One of the reasons I’m doing this is I would like a way to share some of the source images without having to send huge emails with many attachments. For copyright reasons, there are some sources that I haven’t posted images for on the website. I would never intentionally violate a copyright agreement, so I think a private tree to share certain things would be better.

I started a new blank, unlinked tree because I wanted to have complete control over the file. If I had synced my FTM file with Ancestry.com, then my source citations would have been a little weird. For example, it would have shown everything on the Ancestry tree, however, the census images and death records wouldn’t be linkable to the databases on Ancestry. I could have added the records through Ancestry.com, but then those sources would have downloaded themselves to my desktop family file. That would be a no no for me. So I decided the simplest route would be to do this. It’s a lot of leg work sure, but I’m really only working on it in the evenings when I feel like I can’t work on my family file for stress reasons.

Of course, there might be some way to do what I want, without the syncing issues, but I think I’d choose to do it this way in the end anyway. I just like having complete control over these things.

Later this week, I’m going out of state for a quick trip. I’m hoping that before I leave, I get an entry written up and posted about the TNG software. I get a lot of questions about it, and I’m hoping to answer some of those this week.

Back in March, I posted about my new Genealogy Binder. It’s been a lot of fun deciding what to put in the binder and what needed a form to keep track of the information. I’m still going to get some dividers to separate sections of the binder into what I feel I need: Website Lists, Research Tools, Records Information, and Printed Reports. I haven’t fully decided the sections yet, but those are the four I’m thinking about currently.

Continue reading “Genealogy Binder: Update” →

I noticed something weird in the Places tab in Family Tree Maker the other day. It seems that Brooklyn has malfunctioned. I thought at first it was because I added the street addresses to the description field for many of the census and residence facts in my file. However, it didn’t do the same thing for Caldwell, New Jersey. To test, I moved the street address to the beginning of the places field, but that didn’t solve the problem either.

I tried to merge all the different Brooklyn entries using the Merge Two Places option. That did nothing. The places won’t merge.

Is this a leftover side effect from my corrupted file? The problem does not appear on my Original file, so I can’t imagine what I did to make it happen. I’ll let you know if I figure out how to fix it!

P.S. I’m still working on the next part of my Redesigning my Chaos series. I’m having a hard time pinning down a banner I like. It’s coming along though and I’m really anxious to get new design around here.