Genealogy & Family History (update)

J.D Concepts 14 Build your system
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My previous genealogy post is from almost 1.5 years ago, @Keith reminded me about it here. My system has kind of changes since then, with all the lessons from the first go. So here is my updated system.

Software

First of all the software I use is threefold:

  • GRAMPS for all facts and the making of the tree itself coupled with ‘proof’ of my family tree. This is also the information I sometimes copy to sites like WikiTree.
  • Obsidian for all my genealogy notes.
  • File explorer / OneDrive for storage of notes, sources, etc.

Structure

Couple things of note:

  • My genealogy structure is also my Obsidian Vault. All my notes, docs and sources can be linked straight into Obsidian.
  • For now I am researching three family lines. My dads, my moms and my fiance’s mom. All of their surnames start with a B, so the abbreviations I chose are BA, BU and BI.

The top level looks like this:

50-59 🔎 FamilyHistory/
├── 50 Research
├── 51 BA
├── 52 BU
├── 53 BI
└── 50-59 Index.xlsx

(Full surnames in the normal version, blurred for here).

There is a general research folder and a folder for each of the lines I am researching.

50 Research

50 Research/
├── 50.10 🛠️ WORKFLOW
├── 50.11 Inbox
├── 50.12 ToResearch
├── 50.13 Templates
├── 50.14 Learning
├── 50.20 📝 RESULTS
├── 50.21 Reports
├── 50.22 Familytrees
├── 50.23 Stories & Blogs
├── 50.30 ✉️ COMMUNICATION
├── 50.31 Family
├── 50.32 Instances / Archives
├── 50.33 Genealogists
├── 50.40 🔎 REASEARCHLOG
├── 50.41 Trips
├── 50.80 ⚙️ TECHNICAL
├── 50.81 GRAMPS Database
├── 50.82 GRAMPS Snapshot
├── 50.83 GRAMPS Backups
├── 50.84 DigiKam Database
└── 50.85 GEDCOM Exports

Thoughts for this folder:

  • All subheadings ending on a 0 are with caps and they are all empty. Purely to divide the categories.
  • .10 is everything relating to my normal workflow.
    • 50.11 is ideally empty of course, but it never seems to be.
    • 50.12 is my list of wishes to research, which always seems to get longer.
    • 50.13 are standard templates in Obsidian (.md), as wel as Word or Excel.
    • 50.14 are all my notes for information like how to cite, how to digitize pictures best and how to write a researchreport.
  • .20 are the results of my research like official reports, tree exports and stories.
  • .30 is for communications (mails, talks, etc) sorted to kind of connection
  • .40 is for types of research, for now only log of done trips and information gathered (I went with my mom for example to villages and old farms her parents came from and their parents. VERY interesting).
  • .80 is for technical stuff, so where my databases and stuff point (Digikam is old/archive)

Family folders

The other folders are family folders and have the same structure.

51 BA/
├── .11 BA Family sources
├── .12 BA Heirlooms
├── .20 BA Places
├── BA00001 names SURNAME & names SURNAME
├── BA00002 names SURNAME & names SURNAME
├── BA00004 names SURNAME & names SURNAME
└── BA00006 names SURNAME & names SURNAME/
    ├── _BA00006 names SURNAME & names SURNAME.md
    ├── BA00006 YYYY-MM-DD Geb Akte Ede NL-RtSA_999-99_001
    └── BA00007 YYYY-MM-DD Geb Akte Ede NL-RtSA_999-99_001
  • All familylines have some general folders
    • .11 are sources related not to one family/household, like an old family book.
    • .12 pictures and stories about heirlooms or other meaningful physical objects.
    • .20 stories and research about places related to that family. Like a village or a particular farm the family lived for a long time.
  • All other folders are for one family/household (we call those “gezinnen” or a “gezin” in Dutch). With a unique number which is the abbreviation of the surname and then the Ahnentafelnumber of the man.
    • Quick explanation. The central person is 1, so my dad or mom for example. The father of 1 is 2 and the mother is 3. The father of the father is 4, mom is 5. Father of the mother is 6, mother is 7. In short: somebody’s dad is always their number x2. Somebody’s mom is always their number x2+1. I make al surnames BOLD in the folder/filename.
  • Every family has their own Obsidian note starting with an underscore for quick sorting and with the same name as the overlaying folder.
  • All sources/pictures/etc start with the unique number, when a sources is for the man/both it is the main number, when it’s only for the woman (like birth certificate) it is her number. Then the date, leave our DD (and MM) when it is unknown. Then an abbreviation of the even (Geb = Geboorte = Birth in English). Then type of document (Akte = Certificate). Then place and then other identifier (this is the digital number from the local archive itself). You leave out any of these if they are not known/relevant.
  • Any research about children or uncles/aunts which are not my ancestors are inside the note/folder of de family they belong to.
  • I have an Excel overview of these three lines and all names known to me. I try to use the 6 levels of this Dutch researcher (written in English) to see how far I’ve come with my research.

Conclusion

I think that is all for now. If anybody has more questions about my structure, nuances, my researchflow or anything related to this please let me know here or in the Discord.

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@Keith this might be of interest

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@Jayde20 yes, it certainly is. I did see it earlier and wanted a little time to let it sink in.

@_FJ thanks for updating us with your latest structure. As I’m new to JD and only currently in my discovery phase, I’m not entirely sure how things should be structured, so forgive me if any of my comments miss the mark.

I think one of the things I’m getting hung up on with JD (not specific to your structure) is what sits within the final ID’s. I understand that there should be no structure beyond this point. So I’d be intrigued to see how these look at this level. For instance, your 50.30 for communication. I imagine lots of contacts, with multiple communications back and forth and therefore, might have expected to see this at a category level so that contacts could be an ID.

I like your use of subheadings at 0 and their formatting to distinguish them, which, in a way, makes perfect sense. However, at the same time, this also makes me think about moving them up one so that, for instance, you’d have a TECHNICAL category with everything that sits below it as ID’s. Is this perhaps because you’re leaving space for more surname categories?

I am not up to speed with 00 numbers yet either, but I anticipated that you might have had a 50.00 with things like inbox and templates sitting within it, rather than the research folder.

I think I mentioned that I have a slightly different aspect to my research in that I also do a one-name study, whereby I collect all references to a specific surname. Therefore, I tend to have a lot of “Raw Data” that I would extract from various data sources and manipulate to assist with tree reconstruction. At the moment, I am really struggling with where “data” sits.

Another big area for me relates to all the images I capture for things like baptisms, marriages, certificates, obituaries, military records, census, newspapers etc etc. I imagine you’re keeping these under each surname separately? Whereas for my use, I would probably need Images to be at the Category level because I have so many subsets of images, each with its own prefix, i.e. BAP_4231_001, where BAP identifies a Baptism, 4231 their Person ID in my genealogy package and 001, a sequential number in case I find multiple documents for the same individual.

Thanks again for sharing. Reading this back, I feel like I’m being negative, but that is genuinely not the case; I’m just trying to better understand JD and its potential structure, while understanding its very personal and flexible to some extent.

I’d really like to know what you’re doing in Obsidian for genealogy, but not sure if this is the correct place for it.

I’ll definitely share what I come up with in the hopefully not too distant future.

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Amazing, thanks for taking the time to write it up!

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Thanks for the detailed reply! Some thoughts as I read it through the second time:

  • Discovery is very important! I did not know the full scope with my first structure, so it was kinda discovery by working haha.
  • 50.30 communication: I do not have a lot of communication, I do most research on my own. And splitting it into a maximum of 9 ID’s (31-39) is enough for me. Sorted by YYYY-MM-DD at the beginning, maybe there will be subfolders in this ID if there are more lengthy conversations.
    • It is always an option to have more structure behind an ID, but it is not really encouraged. So sometimes it happens, most times it doesn’t.
    • Just like my family ID’s, if there are photo albums related to these people, I will create a folder for the whole album for example.
    • Other sidetrack: I could also have made a whole family history system, but I wanted it to fit in my normal system, so it became an area (50-59).
  • I am not leaving space but otherwise I would have a lot of small categories. If technical grows however, it will probably become 58 of 59, good idea!
  • On the .00, your idea would have been more JD-like, true! But those are my 50.10’s, so there is one category less :slight_smile:
  • How is your raw data sorted now? The main rule is, give yourself more peace finding stuff. So what is the most logical way for you to sort that information, so you can find it later.
  • Sorting by sort or person/family is something I thought long and hard about. For my purpose it made more sense to collect information about one family in one place, because that is the way I would search for it. I want to see all information related to one person/family at once. But sorting by type is good in other circumstances.
  • You are not negative! But the way you do your research probably differences a lot from my way of research :slight_smile: It’s just very good to shop around and make a system fit to your likings.
  • Obsidian is the place with my notes, and within JD there is always place to talk about Obsidian (or some Apple-only variant if you are @johnnydecimal).
    • Every family (man+woman) has a note here, if I have done the research for those people already. It’s the place where I transcribe sources, link there images, make my full citations to those sources and where I add my own thoughts and the timeline.
    • I struggled with GRAMPS, cause it’s mostly a place for facts and not for long pieces of text in my opinion. So that’s where Obsidian comes into play. Obsidian is for researching and GRAMPS is for recording the facts.
    • I can also leave links, unedited thoughts and stuff in Obsidian to research or cleanup later.
  • If you have any more question, for example about Obsidian, please ask!!
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Thanks for responding so quickly.

  • I might be overthinking communication and understand that my needs might be different to yours. In my case, I might get enquiries on particular lineages of my surname, so volume may be higher. And I may be guilty of trying to over-structure things unnecessarily.
    • I have just read about Johnny softening his approach to having more structure at the ID level, which is good, but don’t want to get too carried away. As I guess it defeats the purpose of JD.
    • Just a point regarding my images. Once stored, I rarely look at them within the folder structure. They are immediately attached to a person or family within Reunion, which is where I would view them as I navigate the system, print reports, etc.
    • I did initially think I might need a whole “system” for my genealogy, but I ideally would like a single structure, so I will also try to fit within an area.
  • Raw data is mostly in Excel files by record type, i.e. UK Births 1837 - 1996, UK Census Index 1921, US Passengers Lists, etc. I could have no doubt consolidated Excel files with multiple data sets, for example, one Excel file with all UK Census Years (one per year).
  • Sorting is something I need to give a little more thought to. Typically I’ve used Reunion for all my research, with Reunion allowing me to see the data in lots of different ways. However, with the increased use of Obsidian sorting and finding data there is a concern.
  • Like you, I am using Obsidian for notes and research. One of the reasons for this is that I am hoping to discover connections between surname lineages that I might not otherwise notice. One of the holy grails of my research is to connect lineages into larger groups and trace the surname back to its point or points of origin. Some things I do in Obsidian…
    • I have a note per individual, which acts as a research log. So I have notes on the person, open questions, key facts, and in some cases I’ve found it useful to include a small timeline in the note.
    • I have a note per contact, with data like last contact date, trust level, and I keep a log of interactions with that contact
    • I have a note for datasets that I have either extracted data from or want to in the future. This has things like the repository name, record type, and status
    • I have notes on places of interest
    • I also keep notes on specific topics. For instance, I notice an unusual amount of papermakers in my various linages and wonder if this is an indication that they are linked. So I keep notes on paper making, paper mills and their locations, etc. This is where I am hoping that backlinks will become useful.
    • I’m finding Bases really useful to produce lists, i.e. index of people, lists of datasets, contacts, etc.

I’m always interested in how I can use Obsidian better for my Genealogy research and am trying to encourage others on its usefulness in this area. I don’t think enough genealogists, especially in my one-name study areas, are taking advantage of it.

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