Family Historian User Group

I used to have FH and GC on my ancient Win98 computer. We have newer machines in the house, but the XP desktop is shared with my husband, and my XP laptop has a hard drive which is rather small. So I have utilities, downloaded images, GEDCOMs, Excel spreadsheets, and other files with notes scattered over several different hard drives, thumb drives, CD-Rs, etc.

I recently purchased a V4 so that I could do a clean install on one of the XP computers, instead of worrying about finding my V3 install and upgrade discs. I also have a fresh download of Ancestral Sources.

At this point, it has been so long since I looked at anything, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be best to start from scratch, organizing as I go.

The trick is, finding somewhere to put everything. I'd be interested in hearing from everyone -- roughly how much space are you using? How many people, how big a project folder, and so on. How many other genealogy programs are you using in addition to FH / AS?

My husband has offered to add a second hard drive to the desktop machine -- I'd prefer this to putting images and data on an external drive, because I've lost things on external drives due to failures before I could get a proper backup made.

I don't have much time to work each night, and it's far too easy to mess about on Ancestry instead of doing the work properly. Any tips or advice on getting started again and staying organized would be greatly appreciated. If you could go back and give yourself advice, what would it be?

I'd really like to get everything in shape before April next year when the 1940 Census is released.

Thanks!









ID:5397

My main project is around 300Mb, I don't have many photographs in there so most of that is Census images and other sources. My other miscellaneous files, trees etc are around another 500Mb, so compared to my Photography folders they are tiny (35,000 photos take a lot of space).

I have them organised in the media folder as I laid out on the Knowledge base http://www.fhug.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id ... your_files

I don't use many other programs, only Genelines and occasionally Map My Family Tree.

I mainly use Family Historian V4 and Ancestral Sources V2.
Also use MyHeritage Family Tree Builder and a few minor utilities such as Toponymy, Res Privata, PSPad Editor, etc.

My main Project is about 800MB with 500 Individual, 174 Family, 646 Source, 1064 Multimedia, and a few other Records.
Most of the Multimedia are Document images rather than Photos and comprise about 770MB i.e. most of the Project space.
My entire Family History folder is about 1100MB which includes recent backups, work in progress, experimental projects, etc, etc.
I also keep three ZIP archive backups which use about 2600MB.

Referring to the Knowledgebase article to which Jane refers I have a slight variation on this:

Under Census I have subfolders with the surname each of my (and my wifes) grandparents. Within these I keep the census images titled Census 1901 - Fred Smith (b1878).jpg (for example). I also use this filename for the title of both the multimedia record and source citation in FH. I a few cases I have used further levels of subfolders, named after gt grandparents etc.

Under each of Birth, Marriage and Death I have sub folders for Certificate and Index. Certificate contains the scanned images of the certificate, Index contains images (screen captures) of the Ancestry, Family Search, etc index entry for the event. I generally only buy certificates for direct ancestors, more distant relatives I usually just capture the index entry. I wish now that I'd also created subfolders for Baptisms and Burials, again with subfolders for documents images and index images.

At the Census, BMD, Photos level I also have a folder for documents eg copies or military service records, information that other people have sent me, etc.

When looking at multimedia records I normally use Windows Explorer to navigate to what I want to look at and then double click to open in whatever application I've defined as the default for it. I then use alt-tab to switch back and forth from the document to the FH screen (the picture viewer I use allows zooming in/out, and it maintains this zoom level between screen switching). I find that having the above folder structure lets me very quickly navigate to the source file that I want.

We'll all have our own preferences, but this may give you something to think about.

By the way, I also use an Excel spreadsheet to build a family timeline in the initial stages of my research. This often helps to better see a trail (or potential trails) back through census, birth, christening, marriage, death and burial events. Sometimes this timeline picture has let me spot things that otherwise I may not have found (eg a child living with grandparents, or brother living with married sister).

Hope this helps.

I store censuses images in one folder, irrespective of year or place using the source record ID as the file name e.g. s100 or s999.

When that folder gets too big I just start a new one.

The structure then is (FH stuff)/Media/Censuses/A, (FH stuff)/Media/Censuses/B etc.

I used to keep separate year and place census folders but as I tend to research a family going forwards or backwards, I was forever putting scans in the wrong place. I decided as FH looks after the links it was pointless to file the scans as before.

For other media I have separate folders but often end up putting Service Records in the Shipping Lists folder etc.

All in, the size is 6Gig (but there will be some duplicate files....  where I've put Service Records in the Shipping Lists folder etc.)

Chris

I have been using Family Tree software since the mid 1990's when it was MSDos and have therefore developed my filing system as the data grew and my requirements changed.

I keep all data files under the FH Madia Folder.
I have divided data into 'Family Lines' ie. Fathers Line, Mothers Line, Wifes Fathers Line, Wifes Mothers line etc
and then have separate folders for each person with their birth year to differentiate between family members with the same name.
I use the Faststone Capture screen grabber for anything I find on the Web eg Census data, LDS Christenings & GRO BMD Indexs. I save both the Raw Census page and the Census Transcript under the 'Head of Family' name (as long as the head is part of the family being traced).

The Media File name is also used for the Source Title so it is easy to find and link to a person as it has their name on it.



I have created Flags for everyone denoting which Family Line they belong to, this is fairly recent and I have found it invaluable. I have added a Tab to the Property box so it is easy to edit enter the Flag as I enter the persons details.





My tree has 4000 persons so far and there are 3500 media images linked so far. Since I changed from FTM to FH about 15 months ago I have been slowly linking all my data, I am about 20% through so far. My Gedcom file is only 3.7Mb.

The 'My Family Tree' folder has 9600 files and is 4.8Gb and takes about 30 min to backup to either a newwork drive or a USB Drive. I also keep a copy on my Laptop.

I must have changed the file structure about four time as the data grew and I am still changing how I add data into FH so I can run queries and drill down to the data I am looking for. I have found that the Family Tree is a living creature of mostly dead people.

I hope I haven't rambled too much and it is of some use.
John

On the topic of organising data, the Forum thread How do you organise sources on your PC offers more food for thought at:
http://www.fhug.org.uk/cgi-bin/index.cg ... y&num=4698

In my post late last night I forgot to include my modified Property Box, so here it is.



John

I have just read the threads from the Tatewise link above and I must agree with the comments about Long File Names.
The way FH stores its data means that the Media Folder is about half way through the 255 characters allowed then you start having your data in folders & sub folders etc.
Because of the problems caused I now only have three layers below Media (as my post above).
I did try moving the Media folder to the Root of drive C but then encountered other issues when using 'Working With External File Links' FH kept trying to store data in ,what it thinks, is the usual place and I was forever moving the links back to my root area, so I gave up and moved Media back to the usual place, no problems now, except that I am careful about long file names.
I would be interested in how others handle your very long file names.
John

One technique is to move and shrink the Family Historian Projects folder, and shrink Project folder names.

If for example you currently have:

C:UsersMikeDocumentsFamily Historian ProjectsLong Project NameLong Project Name.fhdataMedia...

then move it and rename it as:

C:UsersMikeFHPProjectProject.fh_dataMedia...

which saves more than 50 characters.

Short project names help because every character less saves two characters in the full path.

Then simply change the default Location for Projects to C:UsersMikeFHP

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful replies.