FLHIG

Family and Local History
Indexing Group

Selected articles from the Newsletter

This article first appeared in SIGGNL 14  (February 1997)

A family history filing system
by W E Townsend

I joined the Group with a view to finding the best way to index my family history name files, and possibly to give me some idea of how to go about indexing the records of my family history hobby, and filing the various artefacts which form part of it.  Some of these go beyond documents and include books, news items and magazines, life insurance policies, and even vases and ornaments.  I feel that the latter part of my requirement is more like archiving that indexing but no doubt there could be a cross-fertilization of ideas.

There was an article, I think in the last year, in one of the several family history society magazines that I take, which seemed to cover the entire subject.  I would have expected to at least have kept a record of it to refer back to, but Murphy's Law strikes again, and now I can't find it referred to in my index of useful publications. [Try the Reviews section of Family History News and Digest which contains abstracts of articles from family history society journals; this might refresh your memory - Ed.]  If anyone knows of it then I would appreciate being reminded.

While writing, it may be of interest to tell what I have done.  I have an Amstrad PC3086 and an HP Deskjet 500, using MicroSoft Word v5.5.  For each name that I am interested in, I have created two directories, one for family, and one for non- family names that I see or am told of.  The second is to scan through when people write to me with their family details in case I see a connection which might help them.

I use a 6-point font to enable me to get in the most information that I can on one line, and record it in five columns in landscape mode.  The first column is a unique number for each line of text, although sometimes there may be more than one entry for a single individual. The second column is the individuals' first name and surname.  The reason for recording the surname in this field is to show up any spelling variants.  The third column is a date if known, being shown in year, month and date order for ease of sorting.  The fourth column is brief details of the information I found.  This column is not limited to events such as birth, marriage or death, since it may be of wider significance such as "sent back to parish of origin", "prison sentence", "paternity order": all the sort of exciting things that can be found for our ancestors.  The fifth column is the source of the information, so that fuller details can be extracted if wanted.

The second and third columns are intended for sorting purposes, while the first enables the use of the running number for cross-references.  Obviously I have column headings, but these disappear off the top of the screen as the page fills, so I also put these headings behind the last entry made so that they move down just ahead of the last entry made.

I had a problem when I first tried to sort, since I was in layout view, and when selecting a column, the selection process would not go beyond the end of the page, thus preventing me from sorting the entire document on the data in that column.  My first thought was to change the page size in the machine to its maximum of 22 inches, and sort within that range.  This would still have given a problem, as hopefully over time I shall accumulate considerably more names than that.  Enquiries, including the technical department of a major insurance organisation, could only come up with "yes, we had trouble with that: don't know what to do with it".  However, by chance, trying to find something else in the manual - by now many of you will realise I am not computer literate - I learned that instead of using layout view to see the documents in its "spread" landscape form, if I activated Line Breaks in the View Preferences box, then I could move the selection process through as many pages as I wished, and so sort the entire document.

Page updated
27 August 2005

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