Overall this book is designed for someone who has recently inherited an unorganised collection of ‘stuff’ that includes boxes of documents and/or entire houselots of stuff. If you’re in that situation and a bit bewildered as to where to start, this is the perfect book for you.

If you’re like me, and you’ve inherited a few small heirlooms or photos at a time from one grandparent or the other and maybe accumulated your own lifetime’s worth of stuff, this book is less relevant. There were still sections in it that I found useful though.

However, none of the links I clicked on worked. I clicked half a dozen, mostly for the worksheets that the author referred to and expected the reader to complete, and a couple for external sites. I understand that the author can’t be blamed if an external site goes offline or changes their address, but it was very frustrating not to be able to access the worksheets, especially when the author generally didn’t describe the contents of the worksheets. The reader is told to ‘complete checkpoint such-and-such by doing the worksheet’ but without the link working, there’s no way for the reader to know what they were supposed to do. For instance, inventory your collection without cataloguing it. What does that even mean?

There’s a lot of information on how to care for different types of documents and items, everything from photographs and slides to books and garden tools. There was a LOT of repetition. Personally, I learned to remove the staples, paperclips, etc. from paper documents, to store letters flat instead of folded in envelopes (but still with the envelope) and to take a copy of newspaper articles and store the newspaper clippings far from all other documents. I don’t have much that isn’t from my own lifetime, but I know my mother-in-law has some of her grandfather’s letters and documents.

The paper/digital filing system discussion was somewhat interesting. The recommended digital organisation system is not significantly different to what I was already doing, although I don’t have a ‘database’ of my digital documents. I’ve maintained some level of digital filing system since I started doing genealogy, so I’m pretty au fait with that side of things. I’ve been more concerned with the non-digital stuff. I can see that some would need the guidance on this aspect though.

I thought the sections on genealogy research were really beyond the scope of this book, and as it’s such an extensive topic, it didn’t seem particularly useful to skim over it in a book about archiving family keepsakes, especially when the author had already covered what to do if you inherited someone else’s genealogy research. What with the sections on what spreadsheets programs to use and what tasks to use spreadsheets for, how to do citations, when to use a database and which one, what to consider when choosing your genealogy software, how to subscribe to genealogy blogs, etc., this felt more like this book should have been called ‘Everything you need to know when you’re suddenly appointed as the Family Historian’.

As I say, if you suddenly find yourself with boxes or houselots of things to sort through and/or you suddenly find yourself the Family Historian with no previous experience or knowledge, this book is perfect. For someone who has a slowly growing collection of heirlooms that she just wants to catalogue, it was only somewhat helpful.

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Created Jan 28, 2020 at 5:37pm • Submit your own review...