My Tools: Microsoft One Note

Today I was supposed to go into town and visit the LDS Family History Center. It’s been there forever and I’ve never known it.

What kind of genealogist am I?! I know the answer to that, the hermit type. I will get my license by December of this year if I have to save my pennies and give up my Ancestry.com membership to do so. I’ll just have to sacrifice Ancestry for awhile, I can always get it back right? The Ancestry price alone is half of the fee for driving school. I’m not into self torture or I would have given up my website hosting fee too. That wouldn’t do at all. I’ve had this website (moore-mays.org) since May 2003 and we won’t even discuss all my little pet projects that give me joy. No that’s not an option.

Back onto the subject, I won’t be visiting the FHC today because the woman who volunteers there knew that we were coming and she left town in a fit of hysterics. Since she knew that our friend was planning on bringing us in and showing us around, she gave him a call this morning to say that she had an emergency and didn’t know if she’d be back to re-open the center at 6:30 tonight. So there go my big plans for the day! I don’t think my fractured family file could have taken it anyway. There was an incident this weekend.

Since I won’t be doing that, I decided to use today to get myself better prepared for next week when I try again. To be honest next week works better time-wise anyway. One of the things that I realized yesterday was that I have absolutely no note taking system. Zilch. Nada. Negatory. I realized this gradually over the last few weeks to be honest. I’ve been hitting a few genealogy blogs (We Tree, Tonia’s Roots), well more than a few but I have no notes to come back to. :p A huge topic in the genealogy blog sphere is note taking. Everyone is giving such great tips and tricks. I was reading JLog a few weeks back and decided labeling my media files (birth, death, marriage cert.) with the Person ID I’m using in my RootsMagic and Family Tree Maker files was a great idea! (Don’t get my brain started on the idea of using TNG as my main program for everything, thanks Tonia!)

Currently one of my favorite methods of note taking is the Sticky Note feature of Windows 7. I love it to pieces. I like to line up all my sticky notes on my second monitor and keep the clutter over there. It would look way more cluttered in the screen shot if I hadn’t done a little cleaning first. Yesterday I was in a scramble because I’d just found one of my Moyer/Meyer/Myers/Meyres/Meyers/BenAffleck guys in the 1850 census. I had to go page by page, the old fashioned way since his name was so often spelled in those various ways, minus Ben Affleck of course. What do you take me for? The township I was going through was littered with people with all the spellings I’ve ever come across. I didn’t want to just forget those people. So I ran to our office supply collection and grabbed a new notebook and started writing down everyone.

Then I started reading about Evernote and One Note from a few other blogs (I’d mention you but I didn’t take notes :/) I’m usually very smart, but for some reason it never occurred to me to actually check out the One Note program when I installed Office 2007 last year. Oh boy have I been missing out. I’ve only been using it this morning but I can definitely see how this is going to be a huge help.