I organise scans, downloaded images, PDF documents etc. according to the following scheme:
1. I have a D:\Genealogy directory for all my genealogy stuff, except that which has to go in C:\Legacy. This contains, among others, \Data, \Marriages and \Places sub-folders 2. Anything which relates to a family or an individual is in a folder below \Marriages and is named Mnnnn hisname and hername where nnnn is the MRIN, so I might have M0123 Joseph Smith and Mary Ann Brown which contains all documentation relating to this family group, including unmarried children's details. Any file which relates to the marriage has (M0123) in the name, e.g. 1861 Census (M0123) and anything which relates to one individual has the RIN in the file name. E.g. a child's baptism certificate might be Baptism Certificate - William (I00562). If the husband is away from home on census night, his image would have both the MRIN and the RIN in the file name 1861 Census (M0123) - Joseph (I00034) When the marriage of a child is discovered, I cut and paste their files into their own Marriage folder. If, for example, two sisters are servants in a household and appear on the same census image, I give them each their own copy of the image, which follows them to their future marriages. There are numerous variations on this, but I've never found a situation which is impossible to handle. 3. Anything which relates to a place goes below the Places folder in a layered structure. So a photo of St. Mary's church in Chelmsford, Essex, England would be in a folder D:\Places\England\Essex\Chelmsford 4. Anything which relates to the family tree as a whole or to large chunks of the tree (someone's PDF file of a branch of the family covering 6 generations) goes in the Data folder. This scheme works well. I can instantly find any file, knowing the MRIN and there's no possibility of duplicate file names. Cheers Tony Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages after Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyusers.com/ Archived messages from old mail server - before Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyfamilytree.com/ Online technical support: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Help.asp Follow Legacy on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LegacyFamilyTree) and on our blog (http://news.LegacyFamilyTree.com). To unsubscribe: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
