Organizing Digital Files on a Mac

Source

I have had lots of genealogy files on my computer for several years.  They just haven’t been organized very well.  Think of a messy filing cabinet…nothing filed where it should be…papers falling out.  No organization whatsoever!

Last week I did a little searching and found a fantastic series of videos done by Ben Sayer of GenealogyTools.com.  He has produced a 9-part series of videos (found here…scroll down to the section called Setup Folders on Your Computer) on organizing digital files on your computer.

I urge you to go check these videos out (because they are awesome) but to summarize:

• Choose a location where you want to store your files on your computer.  Create a folder and name it (something like Family History or Genealogy).
• Inside that folder, create two new folders, one for People and one for Places.
• Inside the People folder, create another folder for each surname.  (I took it a step further and in the People folder, I created one folder called ‘Paternal’ and one folder called ‘Maternal’.  That way I am able to concentrate on surnames in a given line and not have every single surname in my research.)
• Inside each surname folder, create a folder for each person, in the format LastName, FirstName Middle Name BirthYear-DeathYear.  With each person having their own folder, you can place documents and pictures relating to that one specific person in their folders.
• Do you have a document with multiple people on it?  No problem.  With Macs (I’m assuming with PC’s too…but maybe not), you can create something called an alias (which is a copy but not an actual copy…it is really a link back to the original copy) and distribute these aliases into each person’s folder AND rename it to follow the document formatting that he has set up.

It really takes too long to try to write it out here so please, please go check out the videos here.  I don’t think you will be disappointed at all.  I’ve started organizing some of my files using his file system and it is great!  One suggestion I would make is watch all of the videos first before sitting down and changing everything.  There are a couple of things that he shows in the later videos that would have been nice to have known in the earlier videos.