Ukrainian Genealogy Research: STEP 4: Organize Your Records

After these steps, the important task is to know how to keep all the information without getting confused by it. To do this, you need to organize and systematize your data.

Collect photographs, letters, birth, death and marriage certificates, printouts with family groups, and put them in special folders – a separate one for each family line.

Living in the age of digital technology, we can’t limit ourselves only to physical storage units like folders. It is convenient and important to transfer a lot of information to a digital source and store it in several places.

Photographs, letters, and certificates are important to scan or at least photograph on a smartphone. Keeping the scans and digital images on your computer, phone, or tablet is a good idea, but they often fail. If that happens – you might lose your documents.

A better way of keeping the collected information is by using different sites. In that case, you will not only preserve the documents, but you can easily share them with other family members online.

To keep all your digital information on your computer, you can use different genealogy programs and applications like:

Just like computer programs, genealogical websites have different features. You can use any of the following:

You might wonder – when is it better to use the program, and when to go to the site? What are the differences in using offline applications on your computer and online trees?

Applications are best used for:

Programs work quickly, and you do not need to wait for a webpage to load, as you would on a site. So if you don’t have a good internet speed – it might be a great solution for you. Computer programs have many features and capabilities that may not be available on a particular site.

In other words, in the starting research phase, we found that offline applications are worth trying.

It’s best to transfer your family tree online when you confirm and verify the information. You can do it when you gather enough evidence about a specific person in your tree. A document or multiple family interviews confirming the same thing is quality evidence.

The advantage of online trees will be:

As we already mentioned, in addition to brief information about names, dates, and places, many programs and websites provide the ability to add sources of information, photos, and other files.

For example, on FamilySearch you can save not only scanned photos (formats .jpg, .tif, .bmp, .png) and documents (format .pdf), but also short audio fragments of your interviews with your family, and other audio memories (formats. mp3, .m4a and .wav). You can also record stories about ancestors or living relatives by attaching them to the people in your family tree.

We’re giving out a professional tip here. If you add your tree to the website – other researchers will be able to use the information you have collected for their research. Doesn’t sound like a tip yet?

If we turn things around – you can also check what other people have collected in their trees! If someone has already researched the village where your ancestors lived, their information can help you advance in your search!

Do not neglect this collective mutual assistance. It often happens that the data you are looking for on your own and cannot find, someone has already found and published in the results of their research.