It’s so exciting! You’ve just received a marriage certificate and have new family names. There’s so much new research to do and before you know the clock says its 2am and somehow you missed dinner, not to mention bedtime.
Confession time. Before I started planning my research, I was the person who jotted down research notes on the back of envelopes (really hard to file later on). When I wrote physical notes, I might have forgotten to write the source of my information on my page and I didn’t think about how I was going to file these notes.
Time visiting a library or archive was precious (and it still is) and so I would take notes, photocopy and photograph books and documents, and try hard to remember to record the source. But sometimes it was hard to tell where one source finished and one started in my copies. Then when I got home from a research adventure and finally got around to sorting the 100s (1,000s) of photos, all those pictures of churches and tombstones in cemeteries did start to look like one place.
My computer’s download folder had many files with strange names. Some of them with the tell-tale (1) or (2) after their names suggesting I’ve already downloaded a copy of the file. Each one needing to
