3 Ways to Use Archive.org for Genealogy

Archive.org is one of the most valuable free resources for genealogy you have at your disposal. This post will teach you how to use it for your own research.

Internet Archive Home Page

Writing Master Source Names in Legacy Family Tree

I recently realized that I really needed to start getting my Master sources straight. The Source Writer is the main reason why I love Legacy Family tree. It makes writing high quality sources super easy and fast. However, family files will very quickly accumulate a large number of master sources in a very short amount of time. That's why organizing them and coming up with naming conventions is so important, which is what I will show you how to do today.

This is what my sources look like currently. As you can see they are not really organized and the naming conventions vary from source to source. You'll notice that none of my sources are person-specific. That is just personal preference; I use each master source dozens of times for multiple people to save time.

The first thing I will do is come up with naming conventions. The exact format I prefer is: "Date RecordType State/Country County Website". After renaming all of my master sources for the 1910 census, this is what it looks like:

As you can see I have used star signs, dash marks, and parenthesis to separate the record type, location, and source website from each other. I think this increases readability and makes it easier to immediately spot the one you are looking for.

This format organizes the master sources in a very specific way:

1. It sorts your sources by date
2. It then organizes further by the type of record
3. Next it sorts by either the state or country it is in. You want the state first so that all the Master Sources for that state and date stay by each other. Otherwise it will organize alphabetically by the county
4. It organizes alphabetically based on the original website the master source is for.

Let me know in the comments how you organize your sources, or tell me how this method works out for you!

Writing a Biography Part One: Research and Citations

When I first started doing genealogy I knew that my goal would ultimately be to write biographies for as many of my ancestors (and their families) as possible. After lots of trial, error, and research I have finally begun this process. My next several posts will be a series that will go in depth on every step I now follow when writing these biographies.

Step one: Organizing Research and Preparing Citations

This is, of course, the most important step. It's important to have documentation that supports your facts; it prevents mistakes and false assumptions from being made and allows anyone reading the biography to reference back to the original sources and verify your information. I personally use Legacy Family Tree software to organize everything. It has a very organized system for citations that makes it fairly simple to add meaningful and useful sources to your work.

Take, for example, this newspaper article: