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A genealogy project produces an enormous amount of paperwork, from your research notes and photocopied documents to the photographs you find and the family papers your relatives give you. Sooner rather than later you will undoubtedly find that you don’t know what to do with it all! It is very tempting to just pile it all into a big box and hide it under the bed, but that would be a huge shame after all your hard work, not to mention that it makes finding documents and notes you need to work from a bit of a nightmare.

There are various filing systems you can adapt to suit your own purposes. It is worth investing in a decent expandable file with plenty of dividers and labels. And you may prefer to showcase some key documents in a portfolio file to keep them pristine. There are many ways of organizing your paperwork. You might want to classify your notes alphabetically by surname, or perhaps keep all the notes from one archive visit together, but it does help to keep copies of original documents together with the relevant notes. It can be useful to separate your notes for each side of the family, and then by surname and branch, especially if the same surname appears in two different branches.

If you are looking after original documents on behalf of your family, it is important to keep them away from heat, damp and direct light to prevent them from deteriorating. Where possible original documents, particularly photographs, should be stored in strong, acid-free boxes, but if you do decide to keep them in a plastic folder with the rest of your notes, you should place each document inside two thin sheets of acid-free paper to prevent the plastic from damaging them. There are companies that advertise in family history magazines or that can be found online who specialize in products that preserve fragile documents for family historians. If you are unsure, have a chat with your nearest archivist for further advice.

If you have a computer, you may want to consider typing up your notes so that you can create a new folder for each surname. It does help to keep the paper copies of your notes, though, in case you need to take them with you on a future visit to an archive. If you do opt for keeping an electronic record of your research, it’s handy to have one central document that compiles all of your notes, with references to where each piece of information comes from.

There is a multitude of genealogy software packages on the market with the aim of making this easy to do. They also enable you to organize the data you enter into different styles of family trees, charts, reports and indexes, which is almost impossible to do if you are just using a word-processing package. If you choose the right type of genealogy software, you will find that you can not only use it to store all your research, including a fact file of each individual linked up with images of photos and documents, audio recordings of interviews with family members, family holiday videos, and notes about the sources you have found, but you can simultaneously do some of your research online by connecting to genealogy websites that are compatible with your chosen software and migrate the online records you find into your family file. Don’t be scared to invest in a package to play around with, and learn how to get the most out of it as you go along.