Five (5) years ago, in October 2014, I messed up big time.I'm only now discovering my error and realizing the mess it has created for me, genealogy-wise
In the image on the left you can see many jpg files with names starting with "GBPRS_CANT_" followed by a string of numbers. I discovered them as I was going through my hard drive organizing genealogy files.
Because they do not have identifying file names (surname, date, location at a minimum) I began opening them. They are a mix of baptisms, burials and marriages from somewhere in Kent England. The dates range from 1607 to 1832 so far but I have not checked them all.
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| One of 47 images that are not identified. Years are 1639 and 1640 |
That means I was in such a frenzy of finding and gathering the images that I couldn't be bothered stopping for a minute to add the meta data OR at the very least, rename the files with the surname of the ancestor! Any of those would have helped me figure out who each record is for. I could even have simply annotated each one with an arrow pointing to the ancestor found on the page.
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| Baptism of NIcholas Widlbore in 1611. I have now added an arrow & labelled this one correctly. |
I hope I have learned a lesson. I pray I never repeat this silly mistake in future! What ridiculous mistakes have you made as you've gone along in your genealogy research?
8 comments:
What a nightmare! I can understand how it happened. I think we all get so excited and rush to move on to the next piece of the puzzle.
Been there, done that--the excitement of discovery sometimes overwhelms methodical saving and filing. If I save a lot of images in a frenzy, I try to at least move them into a folder carefully identified with ancestor name and other info so I can sort things out later. I hope!
I can relate to this post! It's amazing how we can get dazzled by a new cache of records and lose our focus to take our time and record the proper citations etc. I have come a long way with this too and I am always trying to clean up and improve my recording habits. Thanks for the admission and letting us learn with you.
Citing bits and pieces and theories. Since they were right here on my desk and I was actively searching them I didn't keep track of my jumps from one web site to the next. When I gave up and the scribbles remained on my desk getting buried by other notes. Come the day and year that I get to the bottom of a pile to sort trash and file papers, there are those notes. What was not clear to me then is clearer now and I might have better luck following up on my notes. But where did I get that clue that now seems so important?
I still do that sometimes. Some places save the download with the name that the site has which isn't helpful at all, and it takes extra steps to go back and change the name an/or do the extra things you mentioned. I do need to do that. Maybe someday I will go back to do that.
I think it's very easy to do when we have a time limit for research, like just one day at a particular repository, or just one weekend of free access at a particular web site that usually costs $$$. I remember doing the same thing with photocopies, when I had to take a precious vacation day to get to a particular site and needed to work as fast as I could. To compound the problem, I was often VERY productive with those photocopies, because I was pushing myself to use every minute.
Then I'd get home and realize that I should have saved title pages and other info.
This looks like a good task for some night(s) when you can't fall asleep and need something boring to push you into it.
I have a bunch of files, mostly newspapers, that I downloaded during a period when the box did not come up so that you could change the file name from a bunch of numbers to something that made sense! That was a few years ago and I still haven't gone back to try to figure out who is what. And I may never be able to determine which newspaper the article is in.
Other than that glitch, I have more trouble keeping up with paper than I do with computer files.
Linda Johnson
Been there, done that and have the scars to prove it! It only takes a second to rename the downloaded file or to add the meta data but so often I forget.....
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