Culling / Purging

Have you scanned the paper documents in your genealogy files? If so, did you keep the paper copies or discard them?

This is apparently a ‘hot button’ topic in the genealogy world right now. In mid December, the British government proposed digitizing wills and destroying the originals. This created lots of discussion on X (Twitter) and other sites.

About the same time, Michael John Neill shared a Genealogy Tip of the Day, Cull Your Digital Images and Photos, arguing that we don’t need to keep every snapshot ever taken. Then the Genealogy Tip of the Day Facebook group had a post about a scrapbook containing childhood memories. There was almost universal agreement to scan the scrapbook with many of the commentors arguing to keep the scrapbook.

So what is one to do? Keep or cull (purge) our paper and/or digital genealogy files? When I first started considering this question, I had two four drawer filing cabinets full of paper documents plus two bookcases full of family notebooks. Knowing that my neices and nephew would not have room for all of this paper, I started scanning that paper. In the process, I discarded some of that paper.

While I still have the bookcases of family notebooks, I am down to about three drawers in a filing cabinet. Even though there may be photocopies of deeds, wills, letters, etc. that may help another researcher buried in those files, it is of no help stored away in my filing cabinet.

Thus, one of my goals for 2024 is to go thru those drawers and

• make sure the documents are scanned
• make sure the document is sourced in my RootsMagic tree and that the image is attached
• use RootsMagic’s TreeShare to upload those new sources to my online tree
• upload images of documents not readily available to ‘memories’ for the person on the FamilySearch tree
• share some of those documents thru this blog
• discard my photocopy

I doubt I will make it thru all three drawers. Thus, my goal will be to process everything but my Crawford and Curry research.