Sometimes I come across items of genealogical interest.  I once bought a stack of hard-cover genealogy books for 50 cents each.  Perhaps saddest are the old portraits of unnamed and unknown ancestors that probably graced many a farm house.

Today at an estate sale I noticed a banker’s box on the top shelf marked “Genealogy.”  I thought boy oh boy, what treasures can I save from destruction and loss to hopefully find a better home.  I anxiously brought the box down, set it carefully on another box, and lifted the cover.  Oh no!  Shreds upon shreds of paper, as if the contents had been through a paper shredder.  A family of mice had at one time made their home in this box.

All of it ruined.  Hand-written notes, Xeroxed copies of records and certificates.  Nothing but strips and fragments.  Nothing salvageable.  It was obviously someone’s careful work from the time before computers, when everything was done by hand.

The lesson:  Store your genealogical paperwork in rodent-proof containers.  Avoid attics and garages.

Using Names

Genealogical research presents a problem in that names of individuals are not always known with certainty. You may not yet know an ancestor’s name. If you do, you may not yet know their full name. Names can also change. You may learn the correct or preferred spelling, or you may realize the name you have is a nickname rather than an actual name. As you continue your research, you may find their actual name is completely different from what you thought.

There are multiple ways to refer to an ancestor depending upon the focus of your research. Should the photograph of grandmother and her family be filed under her name, or that of your great-grandparents?  Should her childhood photograph be filed under her maiden name, or under her name from a second husband?

Using Family and Individual Numbers

Most genealogy database programs assign a number to each family in your family tree. Individuals are also numbered separately. One could use such numbers to refer to digital evidence files. But as with names, you may find the ancestor you thought was a child of one family actually belongs to another family. There is also the problem of changing family numbers when a child gets married and starts his or her own family.

Using a Reference Number

I decided to use an arbitrary reference number to identify each piece of evidence. At first I tried to think up a complex numbering scheme that categorized each item according to a number of criteria. For example, the number:

0100-00023-000123-01-0050

was composed of several fields, where the each field held some significance. 0100 might mean the type of item, like a birth certificate. 00023 could be an individual’s number in my genealogy database. 000123 could be a sequential serial number, and so on.

Being a perfectionist, that scheme led me to procrastinate. Not only is it time-consuming to categorize a single piece of evidence according to several criteria, but the discipline required to look up the appropriate codes and properly increment each count is onerous.

The easiest solution is a simple consecutive number, like so:

000654

There’s only one thing to remember, and that’s the last number I assigned so as not to assign a duplicate number.  I add leading zeros to make a six-digit number for consistency.  That makes it easy to know the number is an identification number.  It also assumes I won’t ever have more than a million items of evidence.  A sure bet I think.

Still, the perfectionist in me wanted to sort like items so they would be assigned consecutive numbers as a set. For instance I wanted to group all birth certificates together, then number them consecutively. Of course months later were I to add a new birth certificate, it would have to be assigned a number not contiguous with the others.

As I went through all my items of evidence I had to force myself to just assign a number, without attaching any significance to the value of that number.  Yes, an older item might be numbered after a later item. Yes, just when you thought you collected and numbered a group of related items, another one would turn up to throw off any preconceived notion of numerical order.

My advice? Just assign the next-available number. The number itself serves only to identify a particular item of evidence, nothing more.  It is much easier to refer to an item by number than by any sort of classification or description.

There are of course some subtleties involved in assigning numbers. A couple subtleties include numbering identical items that exist in different formats and deriving new items from an original one. I will address these next time.

I have already begun the process of digitizing the genealogical evidence I accumulated over the years. In the forthcoming series of blog posts entitled “Digital Evidence,” I will describe the system I use to generate, manage and display my collection.

As always, comments and feedback are welcome, especially if you have a better idea!

Here is a method for numbering families (not individuals) for your direct-line ancestry. First, notice that an ancestor or pedigree chart is actually a “binary tree,” meaning that each node, or family, in the tree always has exactly two ancestor nodes. Each of the two nodes can therefore be assigned a unique number. This includes even the “missing” nodes, or families that you have yet to discover.

Start with your parent’s family, of which you are a child. This is family 1. Your father’s family is family number 2 and your mother’s family is family number 3. Now move to your father’s family. His father’s family is number 4 and his mother’s family is number 5. Now move back to your mother’s family. Her father’s family is number 6 and her mother’s family is number 7. A pedigree chart would appears as follows:

Tree Nodes

The pattern that emerges is, for any given family n, the paternal parents are numbered 2n and the maternal parents are numbered 2n + 1. For node 2 for example, the paternal family is 2*2=4 and the maternal family is 2*2+1=5. This formula applies to any node. At node 144, one of your paternal sixth great-grandparents, the paternal family is number 2*144=288 and the maternal family is number 2*144+1=289. Even if you have not discovered your seventh great-grandparents, numbers are still reserved for their families.

Many genealogy software programs automatically number your families. However, the numbers assigned by the program may change as you add or remove families. This can throw off your filing system. Instead you can manually number each of your ancestral families according to the above scheme. Generally, your genealogy software program will not automatically change the numbers you enter yourself. You can then refer to a particular ancestral family and leave no doubt as to which you are referring. In your research, when you discover a child of one of your ancestors, you can include the family number in your notebook.

For consistency, you may wish to make the numbers five digits long, like 00289. If you also trace your spouse’s ancestors, you can add a separate prefix to tell them apart, like B00289 for your family and M00289 for your spouse’s family.

Unfortunately this numbering scheme does not account for your descendants, since each family can have fewer, or more, than two children. It also does not account for non-direct line ancestors, who you wish to reference by number. For these families I assign an arbitrary number greater than any possible direct-line family. These numbers are sequential, starting at 50000. The maximum number of families in a binary tree is 2^k – 1, where k is the number of generations. So 15 generations would account for 2^15–1 = 32,767 families, that is, 2 to the 15th power, minus 1.