keeping census information organized for dum

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 25 Jun 2007 18:18

Greetings all -- now that I have settled on Family Historian on my main program and discovered Nick Walker's superb Gedcom Census, I am reviewing my haphazardly-collected census images and looking for gaps in the collection. The Census spreadsheet downloads have also been very useful for sorting things out.

What I'm curious about is how to keep track of the digital images of the census images. How do you organize them? Do you have a file-naming system that suits you well?

I am researching relatives in both the US and the UK, but so far, the digital images I have are from the US side. At the moment I have one folder for each type of image (Census, City Directory, Military, Birth Reg, etc) and I have been naming the files as YYYYCensus-Name where Name is usually the head of household, but sometimes the person of interest, if I am not sure that is the right family. This was fine when I only had a handful of entries (and if I only have one of my target familes on a page) but now I am wondering if I would be better off with some other system, and if I should change now before things really get out of hand.

For instance, Ancestry gives you the actual image number from the microfilm roll and I'm wondering if, now that I have Family Historian to help keep everything tidy, I shouldn't rename the images to their image number and use the Multimedia Object and Source record lists to keep track of what's what.

I am also using a Firefox extension called Scrapbook to do a screen-capture for the page that shows the information, and for those years when you can 'view all neighbors on page', I save that also -- that can serve as a rough guide to where to find the family you want on a page.

Would I be better off putting each census year in a separate folder? Sorting by location? Sorting by surname? What is most useful for you?

Jan

ID:2384

Post by **nsw** » 25 Jun 2007 19:47

I have a folder for each year of the census. I allow Gedcom Census to automatically name the images to have the same name as the census entry (I use the Gedcom Census default naming scheme). It works for me. Actually I rarely have any need to view the census images outside of Family Historian so really the name isn't all that important anyway.

Best wishes

Nick

P.S. Thanks for the kind words

RalfofAmber · Post by **RalfofAmber** » 25 Jun 2007 19:51

I naively started with one folder for all census images and now have loads of them in one spot - nearly useless!

I need to think through how to move them all to year based sub-directories (I have named them all starting with a year prefix) and teach FH that they have moved!

A project for another day! (and probably some text file search and replace of the .ged![grin])

IzzardResearcher · Post by **IzzardResearcher** » 26 Jun 2007 00:23

I separate my census images by country, followed by year and then family surname. On top of that I use a combination of the head of household's name, his/hear year of birth and the census source number. I've included a screen dump to clarify:

[img]http://www.fhug.org.uk/images/uploads/Image12.png
[/img]

I have found this makes it really easy for me to locate a particular file if required, but, just like Nick, I rarely need to do this, so it is a bit of overkill!

Regards

Lindsey

Edit: Sorry, not sure what I'm doing wrong to load the image [oops]

ganstey · Post by **ganstey** » 26 Jun 2007 13:56

I too have one directory per census year. I then name each file by its reference and location. So, for example, one of my images is called 'RG11 2095 Folio 115 Page 42 Poole.jpg' and is in a directory (folder) called '1881'.

As others have said, once the data is in FH you rarely need to go back to the image, but its there if needed.

Graham

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 26 Jun 2007 16:11

Very amusing reply, Nick!

I should hope the default naming conventions of Gedcom Census suit you.

Thanks to all for your comments. I would like to clarify a couple of points. The first is that the US Census sheets may have more families on them than the UK pages do, not to mention a large variety of information. It is a large amount of information for an impatient newbie like me to take in all at once, so until I find the patience to make my own transcription of the Census data on a standard form appropriate to that census year, I may have to go back to the images several times before it all 'sinks in'.

On one census you can find the questions 'mother of how many children / number of children living'. In my haste to collect the census image, I checked the names of the family members and the birth years, and the address, and did not pay much attention to the other information. It was only while entering the data with Gedcom Census that I realized that if my identification of this family is correct (if it is the couple I was looking for) I only 'know' three of these 12 children! (This would be a second marriage for both, and all of the living children are old enough to not be living at home.)

In another blunder, I saved a page while looking for one member of a family, not really paying attention to the fact that another person with the same surname was recorded 'next door' in the same multi-family dwelling -- someone I had been looking for and did not find because his name is not spelled the way I was expecting it to be!

I am trying to avoid downloading the same census image twice because I have more than one target family on the same page, and this is why I am considering a naming convention for the file itself that would be similar to the Piece / File / Page number in the UK, and the microfilm image numbers. Perhaps if the files are in numerical order it would make it easier to scan a large directory.

Renaming and moving them all, while tedious, would allow me to separate which ones are linked in Family Historian and which ones need entry or further review.

At any rate, Gedcom Census has been VERY useful -- except for the cases where my elderly Win98 box runs out of memory and locks up at the stage where I link in a file, it has worked beautifully.

I am now quite spoiled, and wish I had a similar program for entering the data from the WWI and WWII Draft Registrations (the military fact set has been very useful for that task).

Jan

PatrickT · Post by **PatrickT** » 27 Jun 2007 09:16

Although I'm usually very prone to subdividing directories down to the n-th degree I find that with censuses one directory suits me fine. I use one of Gedcom Census' standard naming conventions (tweaked slightly for US censuses) so that linked image files are re-named to the source name as
'UK Census 1901 Mullion, Cornwall RG13_2235_88_11 (Harry, James).jpg'
'US Federal Census 1880 Marion, Iowa, USA T9_344_248.2000_91 (Hally, Archus).jpg'
'US State Census 1885 Canton, Kansas, USA KS1885_65 (Harry, A).jpg'
and so on.

That way the directory is sorted by country, census type, year, place, reference and name of head of household and its easy to see which families were close to each other in each census. The only flaw in this scheme is that I only use one image file per census page not one per family so there may be more than one family linked to an image that will be named for the first family entered on that page. That gets taken care of within FH as I enter each family separately in Gedcom Census thus generating separate sources.

I must admit, though, that like Nick I rarely need to locate images outside of FH especially since I started using the autotext facility to include relevant data in the source. For US censuses I just add any extra columns which seem relevant into the text (which always needs to be edited anyway)

davidm_uk · Post by **davidm_uk** » 13 Jul 2007 16:10

I use an Excel spreadsheet to capture the census information for a 'family group' so that I can see how individuals flow from one census to the next. I also capture images of related census pages, bmd indexes etc relevant to that spreadsheet and keeps these in subfolders below the spreadsheet. What's most useful then is then adding a hyperlink into a spreadsheet cell which when clicked opens the image or document without having to go and look for it.

In Excel just select the cell in which you want to put the hyperlink, from the menu bar choose Insert/Hyperlink and in the window just navigate and find the file (picture, Word document etc) that you want to appear when you click on the cell.

What would be really great is if FH could contain hyperlinks eg in source records and note fields. Maybe it does but I've just not found out how?

David

goodwin2 · Post by **goodwin2** » 24 Aug 2007 22:25

Since my census forms are only U.S. ones, I have my file directories:

Main lines i.e. Sherwood, etc.
sub directories - born in [state]

Then a Sherwood related:
sub directories - born in [state]

The files are named:
Sherwood Edwin 1900.jpg
Sherwood Edwin 1910.jpg - etc

Since normally the first thing you see in the properties would be the husband/father's name and place of birth, I find this the easiest way to locate my THOUSANDS of census images.

This would NOT tell me what census images are missing for a family but checking my list of sources for a particular family/individual will. And, of course, there are those that you can't and won't find.

Hope that is somewhat helpful.

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 07 Oct 2007 20:06

An update:

While merging a couple of old files, I discovered that I had two men with the same name (father and son) and three marriages, and I had linked one of the spouses to the wrong person.

So I decided to take this particular set of data and make a clean file, re-examining my data as I went along. I made a clean file of the data from the family Bible and then went about adding the sources I had found which supported the information in the Bible.

Sounds easy, right?

I quickly re-discovered why I hate having all my Census images in one big subdirectory.

So I am trying an experiment. I am making subdirectories as I go for each town, named State-County-Town (it's pretty clear which country each belongs to, so I am not adding country for now -- we'll see if I come to regret that later).

My plan will be to put new arrivals in the main (unsorted) folder and only move them to the geographically-named subdirectory as I have processed them.

As I go, I am titling the multimedia objects in FH (but not the files) with a reference that includes the microfilm roll number and so on. And I am double-checking to make sure I have a screen capture with that citation in it.

We'll see if that works.

Eventually I hope to be able to export those screen captures from the Scrapbook file into individual files, which I can then add in to FH as multimedia objects and attach to the proper sources.

Thanks to everyone for your replies.

Jan

JimBroad · Post by **JimBroad** » 23 Oct 2007 13:11

Interesting topic.
I've found that keeping my census images logically (at least in my head!) has been really useful and unlike some others here I have needed to refer back to the images quite often. I must admit that I will often save an image rather than enter the details directly in to FH as usually I'm on a roll when I discover a new census entry and don't want to break the search to enter all the details then and there.
I have found that splitting the images in to census years and then naming them with the family head and location has been most useful to me. I let Gedcom Census do the copying and naming later when I enter them into FH. My file path looks something like: C:AncestryCensus1881BroadHenryLongparishHants.gif

It's not ideal, but it works for me [wink]

RalfofAmber · Post by **RalfofAmber** » 23 Oct 2007 13:20

Like JimBroad I tend to get census images, add the individuals to FH then move around the years. I set a ToDo flag on people for whom I have scans saved that have yet to be processed, and list the years in the main note field

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