3/1/2008
By Sharon DeBartolo Carmack
These five genealogical filing systems will slim down your, weighty piles of paper and quicken your steps to research success.
You can scarcely turn on a newscast or open a magazine these days without seeing news on the growing girth of Americans' waistlines. Being overweight can lead to a variety of ailments from heart disease to diabetes. But every day, genealogists encounter a condition nearly as worrisome: their enlarging genealogy files.
It starts innocently enough — a printout here, an ancestor chart there, a handful of downloads at midnight. Then, before you know it, you're bingeing on photocopies at the courthouse and library. Paper begins clogging every nook and cranny in your desk, spills over the edges of dining room chairs and threatens to overtake your entire home. But you can't seem to stop hitting the Print key.
Initially, finding details about your ancestors will quicken your pulse and energize you, but if you can't easily retrieve that data after you've already put it somewhere, I can assure you, you won't feel that same endorphin rush as you try to track it down. You might even spend just as much time and energy finding it the second time around as you did the first time. What a waste!