Bequeathing Your Online Files

Perhaps I should have named "Bequeathing Your Digital Files" as "Bequeathing Your Computer Files" because that was what I was actually talking about. In an age when a lot of people only use smartphones and keep files online, the post was insufficient so here's another one.  

Bequeathing digital files means, according to Google Search, options for bequeathing your online accounts. I have almost none that aren't immediately dispensable when I'm gone so I don't know much about that but you can investigate individual sites on your own. I'll give you a couple of examples below.

I don't use any social media or keep files online. Old-fashioned of me, but I know where my files are. They're on my computer and backed up to physical drives. 

But I also have DNA accounts chock full of useful information. First, I just left other people the logins for my accounts in notes they will receive after my death. Good enough, right? Maybe not. 

This is what FamilyTreeDNA has set up as a way to handle this. I would suggest in addition to leaving notes with logins. If this is already written into your Will that's good too.

https://blog.familytreedna.com/verify-account-settings-kit-manager-beneficiary-contact-information/ 

It's a very simple thing to do. It will take you 5 minutes per account if you don't dawdle. Click on Account Settings, then Beneficiary, put in the person's name and email address, phone optional. Then inform the person you've chosen. There's also an option to print a legal version of this to be signed by a Notary Public. Overkill in my opinion but it's there if you want it. 

I don't know if any of the other DNA sites have anything set up. I looked but couldn't find anything on them except a 2017 blog post that said they didn't. As far as the trees themselves, probably yes but you'd have to look around in the Settings for a way to choose a beneficiary and you probably should.

Some of my funniest, most charming and helpful DNA matches up and died before we had time to figure out how we were related. They're gone from the database now which means they probably did appoint beneficiaries but the beneficiaries decided to delete their accounts instead of carrying on. You can't control everything. There's plenty of time and plenty of more mysteries.  

I've never been in a position of having my life on a smartphone but I did once order a USB key, thinking I was just getting a USB key, but it was obviously built for smartphone division of files, so I think people do back up their phone files to physical drives and that's a good thing. 

The main thing is you don't want to be in a position where you have files that are ONLY online. Or ONLY on your phone in case it crashes. I don't know. Do phones suddenly crash and disappear your files? I've never had the pleasure. 

As long as you have your files on a physical drive (preferably more than one) and are not dependent on online storage, you're still in control. 

If your executor has your passwords, why would any online service know you're deceased? I don't think they would except in the case of, say, banks because your finances get shut down as soon as they've got a death certificate. 

As long as someone else has the logins, and your phone for those irritating confirmation numbers sent by text, they should be able to get into your accounts from anywhere, as people do. The big question is, For how long? Here's an article that talks about email accounts:

What Happens to a Deceased Person's Email Account? Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook Explained 

Here's an important part. Have a password manager. I've used KeePass for many years. My executor will have the master password to get into it. 

I know some people scribble down passwords on a sheet of paper. Sometimes someone's asked me for help with something over the phone. And as we're going along I say, Log in to your account. And they say, Password? Hmm, password? And I say, Yeah, password. And I hear them shuffling around in a pile of papers. Unless you're very well organized with an indestructible password notebook, I wouldn't recommend it. 

I realize sorting out what you're leaving to whom can be hard decisions to make but decide where you stand and then do whatever it takes. I lived pre-digital for much longer than I've been living in it so perhaps it's simpler for me to know where my borderlines are. I don't think all the people in my life have the right, or time, to know about what goes on with everyone else in my life. Not in life, not in death either. So I haven't shovelled it all up to some online site hoping for the best.

On the other hand, it's not a bad option to do some of that too. If you need more inspiration, this would be the place to interject a horror story I heard. I don't know if it was online so forgive me. A man who was ill was in hospital expected to die. The family, who couldn't stand his lifelong genealogy habit, emptied his entire house of books and papers into a dumpster because they were so anxious to be rid of them. And then, of course, punch-line --- he survived.  

You're still here. You get to have a say.  

Stories

About 15 years or 20 years ago I started writing what turned out to be an unintentional book. 

I hadn't found all the ancestors I wanted to find yet, but I had gained a reputation around the family for collecting old photos and instead of throwing them away, people sent them to me. I scanned all the photos and slides starting with the birth of my older sister and ending at the year we had all gone our separate ways and were no longer a family as we'd been. There was no single place we were all coming home to anymore. That covered 27 years. 

I split the mishmash of 8mm movie clips that had been transposed to DVD into shorter segments and dated them. I cropped and color-corrected all the photos. The slides had to be professionally cleaned because I couldn't do it at home without dying from the inhalation of alcohol fumes. I scanned and dated all of those because thankfully someone had put dates on them in pencil. Then I split the whole works into folders by year and then I moved them around and renamed them individually so the story line was in order. 

In some cases the pencil dates were wrong because a photo that belonged to a certain story line was attached to the wrong year. But with time and persistence, eventually I had it lined up pretty well.

At that point I went back to the pesky missing ancestors and got obsessed with DNA. A totally different story. 

When I came back to the photos and movie clips I realized no-one in the future was going to understand this without captions. So I set my sights on putting captions on each photo and a simple text document to catalogue the movie clips. I might have been 5 minutes into this when I realized it was a really bad idea. What I thought I should do instead, and started to do, was create a document for each year and write a brief description of a whole year at a time, 27 times, using the pictures as memory triggers.  

I thought that would be a fairly efficient approach and I'd be done in no time. 

Of course I couldn't stop there because what was most interesting to me about the stories was what was going on behind the camera, not what was in front of it. Who cares about "4 girls sitting in the living room in November"? 

I convinced myself it wouldn't be a good idea to leave a lot of imagery without an explanation of, "What in the world was going on there?" This was clearly demonstrated to me by an acquaintance who was looking through an album one day, back when I had albums ...  which can be a really boring thing to do, looking at other people's pictures when you don't know any of the people involved. He turned a page, turned to the previous page, turned forward and then back again several times and said, Happy kid, then sad kid, what happened here? He really wanted to know.

By now each folder of photos and videos has a document called [Year] The Story. I work in outline form in ActionOutline and when I make additions or changes to a year, I save it as RTF and overwrite it in the appropriate folder. If I print the entire thing now it's 132 pages including a brief intro of Mom and Dad at the top, how they met, married, where they lived and how they imagined their future before it launches into the kid pics and the reality of watching it all play out. 

As I've written I've gone further and further into the labyrinth. At times I've felt in a hurry to finish it because, you know, the past is the past. At times I've taken breaks from it for months. And then a memory pulls me back looking for the right words. 

It's my book; I get to write it any way I want it. Sometimes I draw pictures. Sometimes I write short vignettes as sub-items. I found the first house I lived in on Google Maps. The surprising thing about this is that the Google Street View car had been down that street for the first time ever only one month before I went looking for the house and that was last year. I could see it from 3 sides close up and zoom in on the side of the back porch. Although I couldn't see the back door I imagined my father walking through it. I checked out the whole neighbourhood like it was yesterday on my tricycle. I wasn't supposed to leave the yard but I used to go all the way to the end of our block and back.  

The way the years are set up to save and re-save by overwriting, it's an endless book. Like Margaret Atwood said, "It's just between you and the wastebasket." Perspectives change. It will stop when I stop. Sometimes the stories take off into strange lands and serve the job of a psychiatrist and there I am seared to my core seeing myself reflected back through the words that come out of me. The past is oftentimes nowhere near as past as we think it is. You may or may not want to do this to yourself. 

Yet Another To-Do List, Plan B

 Obviously I'm not solving the world's big problems here.

I love index cards. I love them so much I almost purchased multi-colored ones. After working this system for awhile, I managed to get half my projects finished. So it did give me the focus I was looking for. Then I was distracted by a couple of unexpected events and when I came back to my bulletin board it was covered with other paper and I was deep into creating my 2026 gardening calendar and I lost track of where I was with the index cards. 

My 3 x 4 foot magnetic bulletin board isn't big enough. I need a bulletin WALL. 

I've thought about getting a smartphone so I can have my external brain with me every second of the day but there's two issues with that. First, my eyes can't manage a screen that small. Two, it's overkill for my lifestyle. I'm not driving and flying all over the place. I don't need to be reading text messages while simultaneously navigating a sidewalk banging myself into light standards. I don't need to be instantly accessible to everyone in the world. Or vice versa. It's on a par with opening a Facebook account. I keep thinking about it but in 20 years I still haven't done it. 

I read that successful people don't keep to-do lists. They put everything on their calendar. This could well be true. Something I have noticed over time is that everything on my calendar gets done. Some of what I put on paper gets done but paper tends to wander at my house. 

I had to seriously look at the insanity of keeping a notebook and pen in every corner where I might have an interesting thought. I'm not saying this is not an interesting method, actually it's quite chaotic but, since most of my clothes don't have pockets, one fix would be to wear a belly-bag 24/7 and have one (small) notebook and one pen.

I've tried paper calendars. A day planner is too big for me to carry around, even from one room to another. A smaller calendar is too small. I've tried printing calendars, one month per page. I've tried posting them to my bulletin board. I've tried keeping them in a 3-ring binder. They all require that I'm tethered to a pencil and eraser.

I have an E-notebook for thinking out loud and doodling but the calendar function is not sophisticated enough for my taste. Even if it was I'd be constantly wondering which room I left it in. 

I don't keep files in The Cloud. I don't need to sync between devices. I don't even keep the WiFi turned on at home. 

So, my single calendar is on my desktop computer. Yes, some of us old dinosaurs still use desktops. 

Since I use the desktop to check my email it makes sense to have my calendar in the same place. 

I tried the calendar method some years ago but never got it quite finessed. I'm trying again. Anything recurring daily or weekly doesn't sit well on a calendar because it clutters up the place. The fix I found for this is to put an asterisk before a recurring item and drag and drop it to its next date instead of having it already there multiple times. As with the index cards, I only put one item per day to be worked on for a limited amount of time, an hour say. 

The other thing is to categorize those items with a color; small color bar in the case of Thunderbird calendar, maybe a colored font in others. This helps to know where the end of the line is when dragging items forward. Creating multiple calendars in different colors, although it looks nice, is actually not a good choice as each calendar has to be backed up separately. If you're trying to simplify your life, multi-colored calendars is a digital rabbit hole too far.

All this to say, it doesn't matter what or where your calendar is, if to-do lists make you crazy, try your calendar. It's a more authoritative voice. The calendar says, Here in this box is what you need to get done today. A to-do list says, Here's the stuff you should do but if you don't it will still be here tomorrow and too often it is. 

Yet Another To-Do List

Anyone who's been reading me for the past 20 years or so knows that I have a thing about organization and time management. It doesn't mean I'm good at it which I should be by now. It just means I've spent a lot of time at it. 

I've cycled through a lot of ideas. And a lot of computer to-do lists. And computer software. And methods for prioritizing. More than I can remember. Then I fell in love with paper again, different kinds of paper, colours and patterns of paper and notebooks and then I didn't look at it, or looked at it so much I didn't see it any more. 

And then AI arrived and for only $20/mth a robot is supposed to be smarter (read, less complicated) than I am. When I heard the advertiser say, "All I have to do is "brain dump" and prioritize", the word 'prioritize' had me running for the hills.  

I tried that one on paper. I folded a piece of paper into 4 and labelled it High, Medium, Low, Very Low and did a quick sort of my projects. And guess what? I immediately launched into spending all day working on the lowest priority item on the list. And then I sat back and mused on the psychology of that.

Prioritizing has a mind-boggling array of meanings and no two people in the world think it means the same thing. Except in extreme cases where a threat to life is imminent and a common survival instinct kicks in. 

Everything on my list is important to me for some reason. More or less important to me depending on the day and my mood. Unless I want to go down the rabbit hole of constantly analyzing and prioritizing and re-prioritizing my reasons ... should, could, want to, would be fun ... everything on my list is of equal status. 

So the question becomes, How to handle a list where everything's equal and everything gets some air-time?

This is what it's come to; my passion for index cards in my face where I can see them. It doesn't have to be vertical. It doesn't have to be index cards. It's just what I have.

 

 

Some of my things were on one list or another for years. And I wondered why I didn't get around to them. The reason is easy. I kept de-prioritizing them even though I thought I shouldn't. Why did I do that? I don't know. Maybe a therapist could tell me.

 

Why this system works so well for me is that a to-do list throws me into a chasm of overwhelm, anxiety and indecision. With index cards I only have to look at one at a time. 

These are not things I do daily by rote, or my calendar that's time-sensitive; a world unto itself. It's not a shopping list. These are projects that require varying lengths of time so some will finish. Some will never finish. Other items will be added. It's very open-ended that way.

 

This game is loosely based on a 30-minute timer. Or an hour or so depending on the project. That gives some focus to things I'd rarely get around to otherwise, like house-cleaning. And it puts a container around things that I can get lost in for weeks on end, like FamilySearch. It also makes me confront items that I don't see myself ever doing and it's time to face the facts. But ... I can still change my mind and add them back. 

The only rule of this game is that once the time has passed for an item I turn its card over and I don't visit it again until all the cards have been turned over and I'm starting anew. That means even the things I love to procrastinate on, but really need to be done, get some time to be pushed forward and my life stays in better balance. Pretty simple.

 

So far, so good.  

Bequeathing Your Digital Files

When I was 50, which is a long time ago now, I wrote my Will. What I left out of it was my computer files because I didn't have a computer then. When I did, it still didn't occur to me for quite awhile how to deal with them. Over the years I left README files here and there and I was religious about computer backups but one day I had a feeling I was missing something. 

On my computer, two-thirds of my 550 GB and 99% of my effort are family history files so they were mostly what caught my attention. I had done years of work, gleefully spreading out this way and that and lost track of where it was all going. 

You may think you know your way around your computer files, and you might be right. But does anyone else? 

I'm not going through the whole thing about regular backups; any combination of cloud services and external hard-drives, multiple copies, staggered by date. You've heard it all before. And certainly from me, ad nauseam over many years. Just do it. 

I do want to mention one other thing. If you don't have a plan for your family history work, chances are it's not going to survive. In your whole household of belongings for someone else to deal with, how do you think your measly hard-drive is going to rank? 

The older you get the more pressing this feels but don't wait to get old to feel pressed. 

Make your wishes known.

This is what I suggest. It doesn't matter if you're at the beginning of your journey, in the middle or at the end. It doesn't matter if you're confused and totally overwhelmed by files and photos and naming conventions and all those sticks in the forest. Your level of disarray doesn't matter. Take one day to do this and then you can go back to the other stuff.

Make a folder called ARCHIVES. This is going to contain everything you want passed on when you're gone. Then go through all your files and move those items, files or entire folders, into it. This will take you miles toward having a plan. Don't destroy any useful folder structure you already have. That is not the point of this. 

Go through everything. It will take you as long as it takes you to make your decisions. It's as simple as it can possibly be. Either you want to leave a file to someone, or you don't.  

I don't use the Music, Pictures or Videos folders on my desktop. It just spreads files around for no good reason. 

This is my setup under Documents.

FINANCES, PA & PERSONAL will be needed by my executor. And then erased as per my instructions. 

Under my ARCHIVES:

 

I'm not suggesting you replicate these folders. I'm just showing you mine as an example. This is a stable structure but it doesn't mean it's the end of my road. I keep doing whatever I do, backing up daily and weekly as I go. 

The other thing you need to decide is who you're giving it to. Make a list with their names and contact information. Not all the files under my ARCHIVES are going to everyone. This is specified in a note to my executor. 

I've gone an extra mile in setting up a backup drive for each person on my list. There's only five. If you want to be nice to your executor you can also do this. These are backed up weekly to catch any changes. Syncback can help you micro-manage your backups.

I don't keep files in the Cloud but it's the same process, just a URL instead of a drive. Have them sent when you're gone or do it now. 

Do something else. Go around your house with a clipboard and take note of books, binders, file-boxes, papers, etc. that are part of your family history and make a list. Decide where you want it to go. Leave this with instructions for your executor. Anything you can do to facilitate the process of getting your wishes complied with, do it.

There's other things I could heap on your shoulders, like scanning every piece of genealogical paper you've got, giving it to historical societies and uploading it to online trees but this is not the place for it. If you can get as far as making an ARCHIVES folder and deciding on somewhere to send it, anyone who loves the gift will have a place to work from. 

OCR Historical Documents

You may have noticed many of the old books scanned by Google Books and elsewhere have been scanned as images.

If you want to extract text from them, you have to re-type the text line by line. This is extremely hard on your eyes, not to mention your time.

BUT, there's a way around this. NAPS2 can turn the original images back into text and it's very easy to do. This is called OCR. (Optical Character Recognition). It also makes the text searchable. This is a huge boon when you have a book hundreds of pages long and you're looking for something specific.

Step 1. Download and install NAPS2. It's open source and free for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Step 2. Make sure the OCR options are turned on. 

 

Step 3. Import (browse to your PDF location) and Open and wait for all the pages to load.

Step 4. If you only want to OCR one page, select that image and click Save PDF. When that's finished and you open your PDF you will be able to select and then copy and paste the text. If you want more pages or the whole document, it's the same process, just longer.

This is an original image, followed by the OCRed text. In this case, dead accurate. This may not always be the case depending on how clear or not clear the type is. And you may have to adjust line breaks depending where you're copying to. Considering the options this is a small matter.

 

"forge in the early part of 1800, and another distillery in 1811.
They carried on an extensive business. The firm was dissolved
in 1826. Mr. Slocum was Justice of the Peace in 1821 of the
district which included the present Pittston, Providence and Exeter townships. He was successful in business and accumulated
in addition to other property, 1,800 acres of land, all located
within the present limits of Scranton, and nearly all of it was
underlaid with coal. He left thirteen children, nine sons and
four daughters.
V.—Mary, b. 22 Dec. 1768; m. Joseph Towne, a farmer; resided
in Ohio near Circleville; d. 5 April, 1844. Left several children."

What I love even more about what NAPS2 can do is working with obituaries. I can't even tell you how many newspaper obits I've re-typed by hand. Thousands? In NAPS2, import the image and then save it as a PDF. Open the PDF and select the text and copy it where you want to. This obit scrolls on and on but this is just the first paragraph. Tiny errors in it. Obviously, it's easier to look through and make small adjustments than type the entire thing word by word.

 

 

"FORMER CITY
ATTORNEY DIES
AT W. PITTSTON
Jordan Howard Rockefeller,
Esq., practicing attorney in this
citv a half century ago, died of a
sudden heart attack at 7:30 o'clock
this morning in the home of his
<on. Jordan H. Rockefeller, Jr., at West Pittston, where he resided
for the past ten years. He was 80 years of age."

Of course, if you're starting at scanning a document, that's what NAPS2 is for. 

Some History

When I first started collecting family history files, the first thing I tried to do was sort them by individuals or married couples. My next instinct was to nest them but I couldn't see a way to make that happen. I was onto something but it wasn't making sense yet.

I filed the idea in the back of my mind and looked around at what other people were doing; sorting by records types mostly but I couldn't see how it would work. How would I find records for a particular person or family group which I, or others, would be most interested in?

It took some time to discover what I intuitively knew at the beginning and now seems obvious to me; a filing system that reflects the family structure of the database. When I read about an MRIN-based filing system for paper by Karen Clifford I realized that was the key to it and went back to my initial idea of nesting folders on my computer.

When I first wrote about it on my blog in 2006, someone(s) started publicly spreading bad press that MRINs are not stable in the database. This, according to Legacy's tech support, could be true, in a manner of speaking, if you were using the free version (I think it was v.5 at that time) because they could sometimes need to compact the MRINs when they were fixing something else. I used the paid version and never had a problem myself. But people persisted with the more common storage arrangements. 

Nowadays this is no longer an issue because there's no longer a paid vs. free version. There's only one full version of Legacy 10 and it's free for everyone.

Some people started adding Windows File Properties to their filing systems based on records, locations or names. It took a lot of years of me talking about standardized metadata and trying to wean people off using WFP for alternatives to start showing up in other peoples' blogs.

When I perused my many JLOG blog posts (2006-2016) I realized this filing system was the only thing I'd written about that was worth keeping so I sat down for a few months and compiled a book out of everything I knew. Then I ran into a couple of things I'd missed and sat some more til I figured them out.

I published the book in 2019. In 2023 I looked through it all again to update broken links and make some small changes to the text where applicable.

So, it's all trickled down to here.

MRIN Filing System+ Is Now Free

The MRIN Filing System+ is now free.

I appreciate the support of past purchasers.

Due to the overgrown, and frankly irrelevant and obscene, list of personal information that I am required to hand over to online payment processors, I am no longer willing to work with them.

Anyone within Canada who would like to send me an Interac e-transfer as a token of gratitude, using only my name and email address, is welcome to do so.  

If you want this book, just download it. It's best in the hands of anyone who finds value in it.

Since its conceptualization in 2003 it's been revolutionary in the world of digital genealogy filing. I think it's still the best genealogy filing system available. And it may still be the only one that's an actual filing system rather than a file-box.

I suggest you read it to get an overview and then again more slowly. Many hundreds of hours of work have gone into developing, testing and fine-tuning every last detail. But, if you get lost in the weeds, for now I'm still here.

Bulk Rename Utility

If you're starting your filing with the MRIN Filing System+ you'll get it right the first time. If you're switching from another system, you might find Bulk Rename Utility useful.

I've used it a lot to bring my files into a consistent naming pattern.

It has so many options for renaming, the screen looks quite daunting. Don't be daunted. There's a couple of short videos to get you started.

Bulk Rename Utility - Batch Rename Files

Bulk Rename Utility Windows

From here you can experiment. Maybe make a test batch of files in folders within folders and play around so you're not afraid of breaking anything.

When you're installing it, check the option for adding it to your Context menu for easy access.

See a preview of your results before hitting the Rename button.

desktop.ini

This is something that came to my attention only recently and from searches it's clear it was not an issue previously. What caused it to start I don't know. I'm using Windows 10.

This can mess up your files everywhere; it's not specific to MRIN Filing but can certainly affect it.

It's a text file called 'desktop.ini'.

How it comes about is when you rename a folder and move its location it will create a desktop.ini to hold onto the old name. In the process it will actually refuse to register the new name. The file will look something like this where 51489 DHT-MHB is the folder name:

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@51489 DHT-MHB,0

You can see how this would be a problem for your MRIN Filing. If you want to know if this has already affected your system, open the folder where you keep your MRIN Sources and do a search for desktop.ini. Hopefully you won't have any. If you do, you'll have to go to each folder and adjust accordingly.

What I've done is turn on the options at the top of Windows Explorer and tick, "Show Hidden Items" like this:

If a desktop.ini is suddenly created it will show itself next to the folder I've renamed. All it takes to get things back on track is to delete it.

If you're looking for a more satisfying way of fixing this, here's a simple video with the commands you'll need below the video:

How to Stop Desktop.ini File from Opening Automatically on Windows 11/10 Startup [Tutorial]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyzhgovPkJY

Searching By Name

Of all the things that are important in this filing system, the MRINs and the metadata are at the top of the list; file-names are at the bottom.

If you're using one of the surname systems without metadata, you'll be searching for names that are in your file-names assuming that you can squash a whole bunch of people into a file-name.

If you're using the MRIN Filing System+, you're probably looking for people by searching keywords/tags. I never search by file-names because I know it won't give me good results. Why? Because all the names attached to a document or photo are not in the file-name.

You can use both systems but you have to use at least one of them to find your files.

Obviously, I'm partial to the metadata approach because it's way less prone to errors and omissions.

The default approach for file-names as described in the book is:
MRIN-Date (1920, 1920s, 1920ca or xxxx) Record type, Name (First name Middle initial(s) Surname)
Maiden names for females
For married couples: (husband's) Surname-(wife's) Surname
For photos, leave out Record Type
Group photos: use the MRIN and name of the oldest person in the group:
(oldest person) & family
& sons
& daughters
& children
& cousin
& siblings
or whatever the case may be.

Keywords/tags will take care of the rest. 

When I very first started out, I was so adverse to long file-names I put names like 0027-1903ca-01 (2) on photos. I've cleaned them up for the sake of clarity but in this system it doesn't actually matter because the MRINs and keywords contain anything you're looking for in that way.

Searching for 'Beeken', I get everything with Beeken anywhere if the Folder path contains the word Beeken. Over 12,000 files. Windows doesn't discriminate unless you tell it to.

If I search for 'tags: Beeken' I get 517 results from having added keyword (tag) metadata to my files. 

If I search for 'name: Beeken' I get less results because not all my file-names contain Beeken. There's all kinds of obvious reasons for that. For instance a Beeken female is in a census record listed under her husband's name. Or a Beeken child is in a census record under his uncle's name. Or he's in a group photo that's filed under the MRIN folder of the oldest person in the photo who's not a Beeken. He's in the keywords (tags) but not the file-name.  

There are other things that can get in your way. For instance searching for 'Harris' will also bring up anyone called Harrison. If the search term is put into double-quotes, as "Harris", it will just look for Harris as a whole word.

My marriage records are named as MRIN-date marriage, Surname-Surname, eg. 0345-1939 marriage, Bailey-Beeken. So, if I'm looking for the husband "Marion W Bailey" specifically I won't find this in the search results for 'name: Beeken'. A keyword/tag search will find it though.

There's a nifty box in Windows under the Search tab that shows more options for narrowing down searches. For instance I wouldn't want to search just 'west' when I'm looking for my West surname because I would get everything else that has West in it; West Virginia for example. So I search 'tags: WEST' to narrow it down.

If I want to go the other way and search for WEST that's not a surname I would search West minus West as a keyword i.e. WEST - tags: WEST 

WEST (1,568 results)
tags: WEST (518 results)
WEST - tags: WEST (1,050 results)

The point of all this is that you can only find what's in your files. Consistency is key. Make up your own 'rules' and stick with them so you know what you can do with searches and what you can't. This system was designed to cover a range of options.

Direct-lines vs. Top-of-the-line

If I was doing this only for myself I would nest the direct-line folders down into top-of-the-line ancestors. (pp. 72 & 92 of the book). But I've been here before.

I once wrote part of my family history as cliff-hanger installments and sent it to two sisters and a niece. I started at the 6th generation because one set of 4th great-grandparents met on the banks of the Susquehanna and immediately fell in love (as the story goes) and migrated to Ohio. It was a very romantic and obvious place to start, in my opinion. And then the story went backwards into the American Revolution and forward to the present.

I got NO response until I sent a picture of the family homestead built in the 1830's overlaid with photos of the first generation to grow up there. Yay, photos!

And later, when I got close enough to the present to send a photo of a great-aunt who looks like one of my sisters, there was an "Oh, I get it!" moment.

I have a list of people who are going to inherit my family history work, whether they want it or not. I've already set up backup drives for each of them that are updated regularly in case I drop over suddenly. Some of them may never get past the MRIN vault and that's OK.

My vault is looking quite busy with 116 direct-line folders.

Now that I think of it, another idea would be to go ahead and nest all the folders down and leave a README text file with a list of all the MRINs for the direct-lines and a simple explanation of how to search for them. There's a free program called Directory List & Print that can do this. 

But I'm still not going to do it that way. There are enough explanations that come with the filing system as a whole and how to install and set up Legacy. I want to give them just one thing that's got a big START HERE button that goes directly into our parents' folder and brings them into the heart of it. They don't have to think; they just have to go there and then there's some chance it will pull them into the rest of it.

It's one of those things where there's no right answer. Consider who you're sharing your family history with when you're gone and can't be around to explain it anymore.

LTools

LTools for Legacy was discontinued some time ago and the website shut down. The latest installer can still be downloaded from my Dropbox at http://bit.ly/44m4VQQ

The only purpose of LTools in this filing system is to add each MRIN to the related User ID fields. This is quite important for navigation and can be done manually instead.

ALTHOUGH, there is an option in Legacy under Customize/Other/Custom User ID Numbers to "... create User ID Numbers by having the RIN or MRIN copied into the field..." which amounts to the same thing and will be much quicker for you. This does not work for MRINs in Legacy v.7.5 but may work in versions 8 or 9.

At least with v.9 of Legacy you can ask tech support to fix that feature if it still doesn't work. And that will be a good thing because LTools, I've been told, does not work with versions 8 or 9 of Legacy. 

LTools will still work with v.7.5 but needs to have an older version of .NET framework installed first. It will tell you which one when you try to install it. I couldn't get the exact number it asked for, 2.0.50727 from the .NET website. The closest I could get was version 2.09 and it didn't work.

BUT, it wasn't over yet. There are very simple-to-follow instructions at https://www.groovypost.com/howto/enable-net-framework-2-windows-8/ for enabling earlier versions of .NET on your Windows 8 or Windows 10 computer. I've put a copy of this page in the zip folder at Dropbox along with the LTools installer in case it disappears from the Internet.

Don't get impatient if it seems to stall. It will get there. Once that's done, LTools will install seamlessly.  

Genealogy Digital Filing Mistakes

Imagine their surprise when they discovered the Earth is round.

I think this is what set the problem in motion. For a long, long time genealogists were accustomed to paper filing. When computers became the thing, people assumed they could just transfer their paper systems to their computers. More or less. Maybe by numbers, maybe by locations, maybe alphabetically, maybe by surnames, maybe by dates. But generally flat like paper.

What I keep seeing is people trying to reinvent the wheel year after year and what keeps showing up looks, to me, like only slightly different variations of the same wheel. You're working on a computer now. It's not paper.

You can't, for instance, tell your paper filing system, "I want to see all the census records for Erie County, Ohio in 1880" and expect the pages to magically rise out of the boxes. On the other hand, you can ask a computer to do that and it will do it instantly.

Well-meaning people say, "Just do what works for you." And people are left to jump anywhere into the pool and filing becomes a massive make-work project, changing regularly as new limitations occur.  

Filing is not just about putting files IN; that's called file-storage. It's also about getting files OUT. That's a filing-system. 

Endless focus on the minutiae of file-naming conventions and folder hierarchy is not getting you one inch closer to a system.

#1 Biggest mistake. Not using metadata. If you're not using metadata, you're missing 95% of what a filing system can do for you.

Subset of #1. Thinking that Windows File Properties is metadata. It only applies to Windows and Windows lives on a metadata planet all its own. W10 isn't any better that way than W7 was.

With metadata, theoretically but not quite, you can put 100,000 genealogy files with no particular names into one folder in no particular order and still find what you're looking for in seconds; single records or specific groups by location, source, type or all records for a particular person or persons.

What I mean by "not quite" is that metadata generally applies to images only, leaving out text, PDFs and other types of non-image files. And, yes, I know it's possible to put metadata into PDFs if you have PDF-specific software that can do it, and then you can search it using that software. Whole other subject.

Filing flat looks pretty. And it's not doing any harm. But, just so you know:

#2 It is unnecessary to separate your files by surnames.

#3 It is unnecessary to nest record-types under surname folders. Don't you get tired and confused when you want to grab all the records for one person and have to race around through different folders to pick them out one by one?

#4 It is unnecessary to separate your files by record-types.
 
#5 It is unnecessary to separate your files by locations.

#6 It is unnecessary to add shortcuts to make sure everyone in a census record is accounted for. You're setting yourself up for misery when you move or rename files or decide in some other way to change your storage arrangement. Ditto for linking files to software.

#7 It is unnecessary to get yourself all balled up with Ahnentafel numbers and other hieroglyphics. It makes you look highly technical and intelligent but ... have you written an encyclopedia explaining this to your descendants or other inheritors?

#8 For everyone else, it is unnecessary to file in a way that only you can understand.

#9 It is unnecesary to keep spreadsheet logs to tell you where a file is on your computer with description, names, physical locations, etc. If you're that lost so would everyone else be.

#10 Scanning photographs as JPG's instead of TIFF's to save space. It's been many years since I had to try to cram everything I had onto a 30GB hard-drive.

Yes, there's a way to find non-image files. Yes, there's a way to deal with duplicate names. No, you don't have to use MRINs and no, you don't have to nest your folders like I do but it's a classy touch with added benefits. 

MRIN Filing System+

MRIN Filing System+ Additions

When I gathered together all the bits and pieces I'd written about MRIN filing over the years and published them as the MRIN Filing System+ I added 3 new sections to it; how to deal with duplicate keywords, living persons & In-laws. This is a sneak preview of the finished contents.

What is an MRIN Filing System?

• The Original Paper-Based System
• What You Need
• Paper Filing

MRINs in Legacy Family Tree

• Family View
• Marriage List
• User ID & Marriage User ID
• Name Views
• Assigned Sources
• Name List
• Picture Center
• Master Source File ID

Numbering

• Renumbering MRINs
• Using LTools

Filing

• File Naming
• Metadata
• Duplicate Keywords
• Photo Mechanic
• XnView
• MRIN Folders
• Nested Folders

Searching Files

• Photo Mechanic
• Windows Explorer

Q&A's

In-Laws

MRIN Genealogy Filing System+ Published

This full-color presentation is the revised, expanded and definitive text of a genealogy filing system based on Marriage Record Identification Numbers.

The MRIN Filing System was developed by professional genealogist, Karen Clifford, many years ago as a paper-based system only. This book is my adaption for digital use. I have used this system successfully since 2005 with over 25,000 files so far.

This is a filing system with versatility and perspective. Whether you're looking for a record-type, location, an individual, family, entire descendant line or combination of factors, it can take you there.

Although it is demonstrated in detail here using Legacy Family Tree, it will work with any genealogy database that uses MRINs or another reference number that can be tied to marriages.

Specific to Legacy, it covers the many uses of MRINs and LTools numbering. Non-specific; Numbering, File Naming, Metadata, Filing, Searching Files, Q&A's and Inlaws.

Whether you don't have a filing system, or you do but can't find your files fast, there are ideas here that could augment your present approach.

(123 pages, 48 images, 10.5 MB, PDF)