Genealogy?

I’ve spent the last couple of years immersed in my genealogy society, trying to assist in a number of ways. I woke up one morning in December and realized that I had not worked on my own projects for some time.

Well, that’s not exactly true, I have continued to collect information, but I haven’t entered it into my database. I have a mammoth file folder in my computer containing unentered data. The great majority are photos, census pages and obituaries. However, there are also birth, death and marriage records, news articles, graduation announcements, funeral cards and a huge variety of other crap items that I have collected. I started earlier this week, and right now I am down to 1419 items in the file folder. Holy cow, I wonder when I will get done wading through this mess? In addition to that, I have a file folder of items that have not been scaned yet, and the accompanying notes. I think I will be leaving the scanned items for the end of the project, but depending on progress, I may have to move some of it up.

One problem I am having is that when I open up a record for a person, I find that some of the citations are not up to my current standards. After looking carefully at the calendar, I have decided to fix the “truly horrible”, but leave the others. How am I judging this? If I could find the source for the information by reading the citation, it stands, perfect or imperfect. If I cannot tell what in the world I was thinking, I am looking up the information again, or putting it on a list until I have a good source.

I am going on a trip to Salt Lake City in April, and I want to have some semblance of order before I leave. After all, how do I know what to look for if I do not know what I know? Really.

In order to reach my goal, I have been looking at each file, one by one. If it is a family I think I want to search in SLC, I am entering the data. If not, I have made a file folder within the “unentered data” folder with the family name and I file the item there for now. I am hoping to have a good handle on my families before April, wish me luck?

Has anyone else out there let information pile up like this? How are you dealing with it?