Using Evernote to Make Virtual Binders for Genealogy Organization

Last week Renee Zamora left a comment on my blog post Spring Is Supposedly Here and My Spring Organization Fever is High. 

Renee mentioned that she is using Evernote to create binders in order to digitize all her paper files. I'm not sure I want to go totally digital for my genealogy but the idea of organizing my computer files using Evernote appealed to me. I use Evernote daily for gathering and organizing recipes, for saving receipts for items I purchase online, etc. But I'd never thought of pulling in files from my hard drive and organizing them into Notebooks.

I should preface this by saying that my computer files are a mess. I'm terrible at organizing them! My thousands of family photos, scanned documents and saved images from genealogy documents found online are a hodge-podge. Some are in the Documents folder on my laptop. Some are in the Pictures folder on my laptop. Some are on my desktop computer, some are on my Western Digital MyBookLive, some are on one of 3 Western Digital Passports, and some are in the Cloud - and more than one cloud! I use Dropbox, Bitcasa and Google Drive so depending on my mood that day I might put the 1851 Census for Levi Peer in any one of those spots.

You can see the problem I have when trying to find something specific. I know it's in one of those spots and I know it will be in a sub-directory of my Genealogy directory, but where?? Sure I can search for  what I want but it's not always easy to find, and it's certainly time-consuming.

Using Evernote I'm able to pull each file in to a binder (Notebook) that I've created. I can see at a glance what I've got on each ancestor and even better, I can click on the item in Evernote, choose to view it in Picassa or Preview or whatever program I want, and then I can easily move or copy it to the proper directory on my hard drive. Killing two birds with one stone! I am making it easier to see my saved files and am able to organize my hard drive at the same time.

My Genealogy "Binders" on Evernote

The first thing I did was create a Notebook (I'm calling Notebooks "Binders" in this blog post) called "Genealogy Binders". Then I created separate Notebooks (Binders) under this main Binder. My individual Binders are set up to suit me, so I have one Binder for each direct ancestor. I am also making individual Binders for documents and photos I have for siblings of my direct ancestors. Each of these individual binders goes into what Evernote calls a "stack". Think of a stack like the folders and sub-folders on your hard drive. You can see my setup for this in the image on the right. By the way I'm nowhere near done with setting up my binders!

Then I opened a binder and began creating individual notes within that specific binder. For example, I opened Peer Gen 1 Stephen - Mary Elizabeth Vollick. I click on "New Note". Then I go to the drop down menu called FILE and choose ATTACH FILES. I am then able to search for and insert an image or document from my hard drive. You can see the marriage registration I put into a note inside the Stephen Peer & Mary Vollick binder. The other notes I've added are on the left sidebar. I can also view these notes in different ways if I don't like the sidebar view.

Creating a Table of Contents for one "Binder"

Once I have all the notes I want in a binder, I can do lots of different things. I haven't finish playing around with all the choices but one I really like is creating a Table of Contents for a binder.

All I have to do is select all the notes in a binder. Evernote lays them all out for me in a pile and then I choose Create a Table of Contents and it's done. The TOC displays as a new note in that binder.  Update: Apparently creating a TOC is only available for MAC users. Sorry to all you Windows users out there!

Table of Contents for One Binder

I like that the list of contents in the TOC are linked to the individual note so I can click on any one I want and immediately view it full-size. I also chose to give each of my notes a title that began with a year because then I was able to sort the notes in chronological order. This helps me see at a glance what I have as a timeline for each ancestor and what I'm missing.

This is as far as I've gone in discovering how to set up and organize my genealogy files as virtual binders in Evernote but I am loving it! Once I have everything organized as I want, I'll decide what my next step is. I already shared one binder with a family member (easy to do from the Evernote program) and I'm going to check out my other options at some point.