Filing Bookmarks

Public Service Announcement - If you are not already taking advantage of the FREE Legacy Family Tree Webinars you are missing out on one of the best continuing education opportunities out there. You can watch them live for free and then Legacy makes them available for at least 10 days in their archives for free as well. After that, they are available on CD for $9.95. However, if you listen to the current webinar you will get a coupon code that you can use on any of the old webinars (and anything else Legacy has to offer) which make is even cheaper. Some of the archived webinars are free forever. The top genealogists in the country present these webinars. The latest one was done by Judy G. Russell, CG. She holds a law degree and is the blogger for The Legal Genealogist. This one is still available in the archives for free. It is a great case study on building a family using circumstantial evidence. It is worth your while to take a look at what Legacy has to offer.

---

So far we have talked about Paper Filing Systems and Computer Filing Systems. Today I will show you how I have my internet bookmarks set up. Someone asked about this on the Transitional Genealogists Forum and I thought it would make a good companion topic to the first two. It was fascinating to see all of the posts about bookmarking systems. Some of the methods were very complicated to my simple mind but very organized which I can certainly appreciate. I have a very simple method that works for me. With the exponential explosion of genealogical information on the internet, you need some way of organizing your internet bookmarks so that you can find what you are looking for quickly.

I have my bookmarks set up very much like my old locality files and how I have them set up in my Research Binder. I like using the same system across everything I have so that I don't have to think too much to find something. The system is very easy to expand and contract as needed.

Here are the main folders and then subfolders. This is just a small snippet of my bookmark folders to give you an idea.

GENEALOGY - US STATES/COUNTIES   [main folder]
AL - Choctaw   [subfolder]
AL - Pike
AL - Tuscaloosa
GA    [this is a folder for any statewide resource]
GA - Columbia
GA - Lincoln
GA - Richmond
LA - Caddo
LA - East Baton Rouge
MS - Forrest
MS - Lamar
MS - Perry
SC - Edgefield
TX - Tarrant

GENEALOGY - US GENERAL SITES
Federal Land Records
Military - Civil War
Military - Rev. War
Military - WWI

GENEALOGY - SURNAMES
Graham
Patton
Perry
Simmons

GENEALOGY - OTHER COUNTRIES
Germany
Poland
Prussia

So my main bookmark list looks like this and then I click to get to the alphabetized subfolders:
GENEALOGY - US STATES/COUNTIES
GENEALOGY - US GENERAL SITES
GENEALOGY - SURNAMES
GENEALOGY - OTHER COUNTRIES

Most of the time I have the folders and subfolders in alphabetical order but in some cases I will put something out of order because it makes more sense to me. I have the main folders in the order that I use most which isn't in alphabetical order. When I bookmark a page, I always change the title to something that makes sense to me.

Copyright © 2012 Michele Simmons Lewis