Genealogy Chat

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I've got lots of census images - hundreds - and I am struggling to find the best way of storing them. When I started, I saved the images to my PC and named them after the head of the family followed by the census date: Clive Harrison 1901. I straightened and cropped each image to get rid of the black border which is so heavy on printer ink, and printed them to A4 paper with the smallest possible margin. The printed images were filed in alphabetical order and then date order. This was fine with just a couple of files full, but as my tree has grown, I find that I often have several families on the same image (which means gaps in the indexing, or duplicated records) and images named after just one member of a family when the image may cover three generations. So I am trying to change. I have decided to name the images by the proper census reference and page number, so that I build up a library for the villages I am mainly researching. Each image, cropped and straightened, as before, has a printed title in the left-hand corner (where it doesn't obscure anything useful), and for every person in my tree who appears on a page, I reference the page with a link to the actual image. I have decided to see how I get on without the printed copies, because I can browse my tree, and bring up the image from within my software. The only problem is that I have over 2,000 souls linked to about 700 images, and going back through my tree and changing the files is a huge job. Mind you, when I started, the tree was growing so quickly, that I rarely stopped to reference properly, and it serves me right that I now have to re-research to convince myself that I hadn't just made it up the first time around. My ideal 19th century family group has every individual, parents & children, sourced to GRO for BMD, and each census entry, with the sources properly referenced, and the census information for each individual transcribed as a note to the source. If I print reports that include these sources, I can see at a glance what I have, where it came from, and the actual information: dates, places, occupations. The ultimate aim is to be both 'scholarly' in a non-pedantic (well, OK, not overly pendantic) way and interesting, and for my reports to tell the story of my family. Am I setting myself up for a fall, and can anyone come up with a better or more efficient system? One tip: for anyone who saves census images from ancestry. Mine are typically 1.75 - 2.0 MB, which is too big for a large collection, and too big to be able to exchange by email with contacts. I crop mine, and then resize the original so that the native file size is A4, and reduce the resolution to 150dpi. There is very little loss of definition, but the file size reduces to typically 250-300KB - a vast saving. Once you have hundreds, that makes a big difference to the task of backing up!

Thanks Clive. I don't have anywhere near hundreds, but still plenty to go on with. I will have to try your method, I have used incredible amounts of ink so far.

I print them out and put them in folders one folder for each year.....

Have got all mine filed on the computer by census year, then referenced by head of household wih aliases for other people in the household. Then I colour code each household - after that I attach them to my family tree software for easy reference. Sounds a bit laborious but I find it saves time in the longrun. BTW I don't print them out but make sure I have a backup on disk

Sounds like a good system you've got there Clive..........and very organised ! Like you my tree has grown and grown and I now have separate files (not on computer-A4 ring binders) for each side of the family, i.e. Maternal,paternal, etc. I''ve done some research into the villages where they lived with photographs and history to make the whole thing a bit more interesting and kept the census images with each family. So when I come to my great grandfathers family its all there -where they lived, how they lived, paf reports and census images. But its getting now so that I have so many branches to the family I need more files and more shelves to put them on.,............lol ( I like the idea of cutting off the black border before printing out the images - how do you do that ? I'm not too hot at this hitech stuff.)

I just bought an Epsom all in one and you can just copy the image in view and not the whole page, so I can just copy the family I want and not all their neighbours which saves a lot of Ink and the images are much easier to read as the writing is also bigger.Then I throw them in a drawer, very organised.

As I started a long time ago, my census records are all transcriptions, rather than images. Each village has it's own page, with the transcriptions being arranged chronologically -these are filed alphabetically, by village name, within counties.(I have both a paper and computer version {+ back up discs}) On my family tree software, I have recorded where each individual is for each cesus. In my display files, for families, I have copied and pasted just the relevant entries for them, in chronologial order, showing at a glance how they moved about. I personally do not like whole sheets in these files - I find them far too bulky and distracting, especially if only one person on the sheet is of relevance. I couldn't bear the fag of changing to a new system, going back over information gleaned years ago and downloading yet hundreds more images. I think it is a case of finding your own system, what works for you, and sticking to it. I have similar arrangements for PR and for GRO refs. Separate files for each - paper and elecronic. After years of researching, I am really enjoying working on the putting together of all the different types of information and collating it in presentation folders. However, I am recinciled to the fact that it is a lifetime's work and I shall never be finished. Jay

I have a spreadsheet with columns for Name,Birth,Marriage,Death and one for each census. I then highlight in grey the columns that cannot apply (i.e census before birth or after death), then just enter which document contains that person's details (quarter,year,district,vol,page for BMD or HO/RG number, piece, folio and page for census). The images are then filed on the PC with the same naming convention and the ones I have printed (I don't always print them all) in a filing cabinet under the same reference. With this method I can see at a glance of the spreadsheet what information is missing and needs searching for.