Anyone in charge of their family genealogy? How do you organize your information? Binders? Computer program(s)? I’m just getting started, but prefer to not use online programs like Ancestry.com (yet) for privacy reasons. I also prefer to keep the information on my own computer & backup, rather than the cloud. Eventually I may want to share, but for now I just need a good system!
You can set your tree to completely private on ancestry.com just FYI
Following, I just inherited my mom’s stuff which I don’t want to store!
One of my cousins put our family genealogy chart on Geni.com several years ago, but just last month my mom sent me several PDFs with the written history complied by one of mom’s first cousin (who would be 110ish if alive today) which goes all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition on my material great great grandmothers side and back to 1840 on my maternal great great grandfathers side (who were not from Spain as far as we know.)
Apparently there was a family ledger started by the first know Spanish ancestor when they left Spain and went to France (the first stop on the family journey which led to eventually ending up Lithuania, before my great Grandmother and Great Grandfather emigrated here in 1900 with their 7 children.) On the cover of the journal the ancester asked for all successive holders of the journal to document family members and where they were presently living. Sometime in the 1980’s my mom’s cousin went to Israel and talked to an even older relative who recalled seeing the journal as a child at his grandmother’s house. That is the last known sighting of the journal. 
Also written in the pdf’s was my GG grandparents and G grandparents lives while living in Lithuania and Belarus - even descriptions of their homes, their work, the villages, the schools they went to, the occasional pograms, etc.-, and when and how the left the Pale and how they ended up where the did in the US. That info came from written journals of several of my great grandfathers siblings and letters written between the siblings in the late 1800’s early 1900’s.
It was a real slog (but fascinating) and I had to read it several times to keep straight in my mind which side of my maternal family was which - which was made more complicated because last names were similar and there were definitely some intermarriages between the families. There was also information on when and why the surnames changed - usually because of decrees issued by Germany or Russia and the meanings of the names. The written history goes up to my generation (our births; marriages, divorces, deaths) but the chart on Geni is up to present day.
The guy on Finding Your Roots has nothing compared to what my moms cousin traced! She spent several decades dedicated to her research and according to my mom her interest started at a young age so she already had knowledge of many of the stories told to her by her mother (the oldest of my GG parents children who was 17 when they came here in 1900.)
Several of my cousins also have the pdf’s and I’ve stored them on my computer and cloud and printed out a hard copy.
@romanigypsyeyes: I thought you could keep it private from other users…but not necessarily from Ancestry.com who compiles all the info.? Nothing particular we need to keep private…that I KNOW of – yet 
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.
Other than maybe pictures, no one really gives ancestry anything they don’t already have.
Ha, ha, ha, organizing genealogical information. This is a great idea if you have a whole lot of time to devote to it. Otherwise, you are likely to be drowning in information very quickly.
You can set up a family tree on Ancestry. Some of them are very helpful. I have found a few probable ancestors in that way. I have also found some real treasures–e.g., a poem written by my grandfather as a college student that wound up in the college year book, and a picture of a great-grandfather when he was young. I have also found some really amusing genealogical connections, including my relation to Old King Cole, Aeneas, and Anchises.
You could create standard GED files, though the interconnected trees on Ancestry are more useful, in my opinion.
For my overall organization structure, I set up an Ahnentafel (a German way of organizing the tree, by generations). The starting person’s father is numbered 1, mother 2 (sorry about the implicit sexism), father’s father 3, father’s mother 4, mother’s father 5, mother’s mother 6, etc. My grandfather had a different scheme, using FF for father’s father, and (for example) FMFFM for father’s mother’s father’s father’s mother. You can convert between the notations fairly easily.
I sent up my Ahnentafel pages in landscape layout, to go 4 generations deep, entering various dates and places about the first 3 generations, with limited data on the fourth. Then I set up pages that start with each of the members of the fourth generation back on the center left, going to the 7th generation, with details (such as they were) on generations 4, 5, and 6, but just limited data on generation 7. Then I started pages with generation 7 back on the center left, running through generation 10, in the same pattern. This actually works out fairly well–you can lay it out on the floor of a very large room!
Aside from that, I currently just have boxes, though some day in the future I hope to have binders. Maybe after retirement? Good luck!
I use Legacy, which is a software specifically designed for Genealogy stuffs. It’s a little confusing to use sometimes, but better than a shoe box!
“This is a great idea if you have a whole lot of time to devote to it. Otherwise, you are likely to be drowning in information very quickly.”
I think that you are likely to quickly either run into dead ends, or be drowning in information. I found most of my search became impossible four or five generations back, but a bit of it just sort of kept going for a very long time. I eventually just stopped after finding a few thousand ancestors. Doubling every generation back gets large quickly if you are actually finding most of the information.
I too have been a bit concerned about the security of anything online, and have been just keeping it in a large text file, sorted depth first.
One issue that I found: The file grew really big. I therefore had to keep a tab on each person to figure out how they were related to me and/or my daughters. You could for example use “FMMF” to note your father’s mother’s mother’s father. For five or six generations this probably isn’t needed, but if you get back 15 or 20 generations otherwise it gets pretty difficult to keep track of who goes where.
Keep a backup on CD or equivalent hard storage.
It helps if you can do this while older relatives and in-laws are still around. Sometimes they can be quite helpful.
I used some family tree software several years ago, but you have to keep upgrading or eventually can’t get at your data (what happened to me). If I were going to do it again, Id probably just go online to avoid the obsolescence issue.
This is not so much an organizational tip as a preservation one. Figure out who else in your family is interested in genealogy. If there are no likely suspects right now, hook someone. Tell that person what you are doing and how you are organizing the information. The family history is a great gift to bequeath to your descendants.
Let me add one suggestion: write your own story, too. Someday, even the little details will be fascinating to people. We have some commentary from my grandfather and from one of my great^3 grandfathers, and a diary of one grandmother from the year she turned 12.
My genealogy really shows the forces of history: The Dutch show up just when you would expect. The Germans show up just when you might expect. The Swedes show up just when you would predict. The English are a little more scattered in terms of the arrival year, but they fit with the currents of history.
Each of the ancestors who came here was following his/her own plans, but they definitely fit into the historical pattern. This has made me more aware of the historical forces acting on me.
Several years ago, one of my dad’s cousins self-published a book consisting of old diary entries, poems she wrote as a young woman, and a few family photos. It is almost magical to read the diary entries, most very short. Some are heart-wrenching (finding the body of her mother, who killed herself, in the basement one early spring day after school), some bittersweet (that my grandmother seemed to have been more fun before she took a new first name), some simply entertaining (my father throwing or hitting a baseball that broke a car window). I treasure this volume.
I use Family Tree Maker, an older program that works great for me. I really got into genealogy about 18 years ago, although I had interested since an early teen. Oh…the regrets of not writing down the stories and asking questions of grandparents before they passed. I met so many wonderful, helpful people throughout the US; lots of extended cousins from family lines. Many of them are gone now and I treasure what they so willingly shared.
I became the family “historian”. When that happens, information and documents flow in from all sides, especially as the older generations pass. I have so much stuff and feel a deep obligation to preserve it in the best way possible. A lot of it is original paper, original land grant deeds, photo albums from the Civil War, my grandma’s doll from 1909, etc. Although I’d like it all scanned into electronic format, I think that becomes “lost” and family/descendants can’t easily view it, so I want the physical items, too.
Guess I don’t have an answer on organization, but I’m currently in the middle of a quick-onset downsizing venture. A lot is going into temporary storage, but the genealogy is staying with me at the rental.
Okay…
You can use GRAMPS–a free software program you can download online.It’ts a bit clunky, but it’s free and you can keep everything on your computer. https://gramps-project.org/introduction-WP/
You can use Tribal Pages. www.tribalpages.com. The simple version is free and you can choose to stay out of the directory if you want to do so. Even if you opt in, nobody can see your tree without your permission.
There are a gazillion genealogy software programs, including one specifically for Macs.
jonri knows this field.
As mentioned above, the more detail the better regarding the stories of people’s lives. Names and origins are precious when you get them and I asked my grandmother before she passed away. What I regret not asking, is more detail to flesh out those names. Their interests, skills or the lack, and a psychological profile. I have a book from a great great aunt, which is quite honest for the time, written around 1908. Some of the psychological tendencies ring true for my generation, and there is something quite reassuring about reading these details which I see echoed in me and my cousins.
If you aren’t already aware of Family Tree Magazine, that might give you some ideas I that regard.
Anyone using Ancestry.com…
Question: I’ve started a tree and have been dutifully adding relatives yet when I go to “view” my actual tree as the home graphic (the diagram) it only shows on father’s side to great-grandparents (an icon for them) It doesn’t have similar icons going back for relatives I’ve added. Their profile is there as a relationship ship to the great-grandparents but not icon of their own or represented in the overall tree…
HELP! What am I doing wrong?..