Note Your Searches

If you are serious about finding answers to your questions, note-taking is a vital part of your search!!

It’s a difficult admission to make, but we all know it’s true:

We don’t have perfect memories.

At dinner tonight, you may be able to rattle off the names of a dozen websites or books you searched in this morning.

But tomorrow you may only be able to name eleven of those twelve resources.

And how about in a month? How certain will you be that you haven’t already tried X, Y or Z if you rely on your brain’s memory alone?

Thus you find yourself repeating your efforts and becoming discouraged, thinking you’ll never find what you’re looking for.

Even when you make a spectacular family history find, you may not remember six years down the road which of your cousins shared that photograph with you. And if it didn’t get carefully labeled, you may not remember who is in the photograph!! What a shame, right?

Happily, there is a solution to these dilemmas 😊

Note your searches!

Note your findings!

Note it, note it, NOTE IT!!

How to Note

As I mentioned previously, taking notes of your search is best done in the moment you are searching. That way you don’t risk even the shortest of short-term memory losses!

A professional genealogist often takes these notes in a spreadsheet or table in a word processing document. Templates that I have created and use on a regular basis can be found below.

That being said, I am not here to push that you take notes in a specific manner.

I think that the right way for YOU to take notes is the way that YOU will actually DO IT.

Maybe you will use a template like the one I shared.

Maybe you will record your screen while performing online searches and then save those videos in a folder labeled with your ancestor’s name.

Maybe you’re a fan of a note-taking app like Evernote or OneNote. Great! I have no experience with these but do not doubt they could be powerful tools in family history research.

Maybe you prefer pen and paper and you’ll note your searches “the old-fashioned way.”

My theory is that if you’re consistent in noting somehow, you’ll soon be convinced of the value of this principle.

Eventually you may tweak the particulars of how you take notes, and that’s okay.

While screen-recording may have been easy in the moment, you may discover that it’s laborious to review those videos…Maybe there’s something to the notion of using a written digital form so a word-find function can quickly get you to the place where you noted searching for a specific spelling or all searches performed on the website Fold3…

This much I know for sure:

If you take NO notes, you almost may as well have not looked. You will someday forget it.

So do yourself a favor:

do something to lengthen and strengthen your memory of your research.

What to Note

You should include the information that will help Future You remember what questions you asked, where you looked, and what it is you found (or didn’t find).

Professional genealogists generally note the following:

• the date of their search
• where they searched
• the terms they searched for (a.k.a. search parameters)
• the results of their search (including searches that yielded nothing!!)
• a citation for their findings
• other notes about the information found

Now if this list gets you thinking, “That’s too much! Noting my research is going to be a CHORE! Forget it! I’m not going to mess with this at all!”

PLEASE re-consider!!!

I could carry on at length about why each of these elements is valuable to me.

But your family history search is YOURS.

Take whatever notes YOU think will be of value.

Maybe at the outset, your notes will be pretty barebones.

Maybe your “citations” will be copy/pasted urls or “waypaths” that you write for yourself.

Instead of sweating over writing a perfect citation for the book you found at the library, go ahead and use your phone to snap pictures of its cover, the title page, and the page with information that answered your question. Then insert those photos into your log, or throw them in a Google Photos album labeled with your ancestor’s name.

If your research is mainly in artifacts rather than in record sets, then maybe you take notes in an entirely different form! Maybe your “notes” are really a scrapbook of photos – but with LABELS of some kind that tell who is in the photo, where it was taken, etc, and how it came into your hands 🙂

If you have experience in note-taking and want to share other ideas, please comment on this post!

A Reminder

Don’t forget to note searches that are not conducted right at your computer! The phone conversation, the email, the inquiries you make at your family reunion, the microfilm you view at an archive. You’ll want to remember those too!

Save Yourself Some Tears

Note something about your research in some way and Future You will look back with appreciation.

You’ll realize that tears have been prevented.

Your searches have been more productive.

Your family finds will not be so easily forgotten.

Finally: You’re on to the last step in the research process! Turn Your Heart-Again!